Our trip to Auschwitz and Birkenau was so important for me to do as a social studies teacher who teaches about the Holocaust. One can read facts and figures in a book, and one can even read stories from witnesses, but until one sees the fences and walks the grounds one cannot truly connect to the history. I walked away from these camps with a better understanding of how the camps were run. The kids always have questions about how the camps worked, what happened there, and what they looked like. Well, I feel I can better answer their questions and bring them my experience as well. We saw Auschwitz I which was a concentration camp where prisoners there worked outside the camp, but there were also medical experiments, firing squads, and the first gas chamber and crematorium. Then we went to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. This camp stirred some strong emotions. The immensity of the camp was astonishing. The shear size was impressive, I had no idea how large the camp was and it was overwhelming. Again I probably had read the figures, but to see how expansive it is, how small you feel standing there, and then realizing how many people it could accomodate makes you realize how much devastation and destrcution occured. The conditions there were worse than Auschwitz I. The barracks are wooden structures that were crammed full of people waiting to die. Everything was so well planned out by Himmler, that it frightens me that humans can do this to other humans. I cannot fathom what it must have been like to be awaiting your fate there. I pray that we have grown as humans, but then I return to the hotel room and watch CNN or BBC, and I wonder if we have. I will continue to pray and teach because it is so important for my students to learn how important it is to love each other as human beings.
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