However, it was only after I was home for a few months that I realized the extent that trip changed me. I wanted to be changed and I was. I wanted to learn about myself and I did. I did not realize it at the time but now looking back, it was the single most important and happiest time of my life. The moments I go back to, those fleeting moments that I want to hold on to forever.
I had taken a small netbook on the road with us and I had been diligent about journaling everyday. After months in a pack, with gross clothes, in nine+ countries, thrown under buses, in trains, shoved into lockers, slept on - on benches, beaches, front porches - well it died. I was DEVASTATED. There is no other word. I know its a computer but those few (it was more like a few hundred) pages meant everything.
About a month ago (and almost two years to the DAY after the trip) I restarted the netbook to check if it had a harddrive that I could remove and the the thing restarted!!! YES.
I had journaled everday, written every moment and to get the memories back was a blessing. There are a few moments that I want to forget, MANY I had forgotten, and many I never will.
This is the story of my trip to Auchwitz. I will not try to talk about the place, the sights, or what we did there. I don't think I can fully explain how it made me feel. But I will share this.
We took the train from Prague into Poland late on a Thursday - leaving at 11:30PM and traveling through the night. We did not have enough money for private bunks to sleep and the train on that route is considered very dangerous - for theft, vandalism, etc. so we hunkered into one cabin with a couple from Poland. The train was an Eastern European gem and if you have traveled on a train in Eastern Europe you can picture what it was. It transported me into a differnt time - it was not 2010 on that train. It was 1940 and I became a new soul on that trip.
We did not sleep well sitting upright with our packs on our laps and locked to our bodies (which was common). It was dark and freezing on the train and I remember the wind and noise of the rails cutting through the night. In the middle of the night I suddenly awoke and S and L were across from me cuddled together, no one else stirred in the cabin but I was instantly aware of what woke me.
Through the night sky, approaching swiftly on the landscape it was there. Auchwitz.
It came at me quickly and stared into my soul. I don't know if I had lost ancestors there, if I had ancestors responsible there but one of them had awoken me to their presence and their prison. All I can remember was the size of the budiling and the atmospehere that surrounded it that seeped into my train cabin. It was the scariest moment of my life. I watched it go as we slowly chugged past knowing I would see it again - the next day.
On the following day we toured Auchwitz - the bunks, the rooms full of hair, shoes stolen off prisioners feet, the ovens to start fires, the gas chambers where people fell, where they were murdered. The train tracks, the rooms of torture. None of it was off limits and each brought more emotion from your soul. It is impossible not to be sobered by such an experience, to know the ground you walked was the home to spirits of thousands.
Our tour guide was a young Polish man - soft spoken and so emotional about the camp. I assumed he had many family members taken there but in the end I believe he was one of these lost souls. He would not speak of anything personal or how he came to guide there but only spoke of the camp, the plans the Nazis had for its future, and the experiences the people there endured. He did not answer questions but knew and told everything you needed to know. He had a silent strength and I could tell it pained him to walk these grounds.
The last stop he brought us to were two destroyed gas chambers and as we looked on into the rubble - that has never been touched, moved, tried to be hidden; the sun shone on me with such love. It was the most opposing feeling I have ever had. I felt the warmth, stregth, beauty of the day as I walked the perimeter of the gas chambers that took so many lives. Yet here I was in a perfect afternoon with no clouds, no pain in my future. But our guide never noticed the day, he whispered the story of this place with certainty. It was as if he whispered into the ears of each of as separately with the attention he took from us. As he finished his last words he turned and went quickly. The sun was setting and he did not walk to the gate, over the train tracks to freedom, instead he walked into the field of bunks and instantly without anyone noticing - he was gone. We waited to see him, to thank him for the afternoon, and he never returned. I know he could have walked out another way, he could have slipped past in my preoccupation with the place. But I believe he was not able to leave the gate, that he still does not have freedom. That everyday he is there and travels into the bunks and shares his story.
I was given a tour by a ghost of Auchwitz.
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