I Choose...Majdanek Honestly, this post has gone through a lot of revisions. I have struggled with what I wanted to say about Majdanek, the Nazi death camp where we spent most of our day today. Majadanek, established by the Nazis in 1941 as first a prison for Soviet POWS and then later, in 1942, a death camp for Jews, sits about 105 miles from Warsaw outside the city of Lublin near the Polish Ukrainian border. It is everything that movies and photographs have taught us that Nazi concentration camps should look like. It was liberated by the Soviet army who caught the Nazis by surprise, insuring that they didn't have time to destroy the camp. It is remarkably preserved, including barracks, gas chambers, and crematoriums. It is what our "pop culture' visions says camps should be - squat, dark buildings surrounded by barbed wire and emanating a sense of despair. So I struggled what to write about after coming back from Majdanek today. I considered "lecturing" on the sense of false inevitability that our 21st century eyes sometimes see the Holocaust through and detail the haphazard way in which the Nazis arrived at the "final solution" to the "Jewish question" but decided that it was better left for the classroom. I considered a retelling of the history of the place but decided that it had been done already and far better than I could. (USHMM link). I considered sharing stories of survivors and their struggle to live in a place that was constructed in order to bring about their death but decided that I would never convey their stories as well as they have in their memoirs. I even considered retelling stories of the sadism of guards and fellow prisoners against the inmates as an example of human depravity but decided that they do not deserve my time. Instead, I chose two themes that resonated with me as I walked through the former camp. I felt an overwhelming sense of myself and my own life. I wanted to walk alone through this place and stayed back to let the group dissipate before I began. Each step into each selection yard, barrack, gas chamber, and crematorium put me into a place where I asked "what would I have done?". I wonder how I would have handled a brusk and incomplete goodbye with my husband, how I would have comforted my children as we waited for death in the chambers, or, if they had died and I had lived, separated in the women's camp, I wondered if I would have been able to find the strength to live. To go on. To get up and not to give in. What I wish I would have felt in those places and in myself was an unwavering assurance that I would have been brave, soldiered on, found the will to live...that I would have SURVIVED. But I felt a certain emptiness that was far from reassuring. I can't know what I would have done if I had held my children in the gas chamber before our deaths or been given mere moments to say goodbye to my husband with whom I have shared more than ten years of my life. I cannot know, I cannot fathom, what I would have done alone, having lost the things I hold most dear. Left: Entrance to the gas chamber at Majdanek/Right: intact crematoriums at Majdanek Yet, even though I may not know what I would have done and cannot fathom the choices I would have had to make, I do know what choices I have now in these far less extreme circumstances. As a group of teachers on this trip, we have struggled with the how....how could a person treat another person this way, how did people reconcile their evil deeds with their conscience? There is an overly simplistic Holocaust narrative that identifies hatred as the underlying cause and follows through to the death of 6 million Jews as the inevitable culmination of that hatred. Yet I believe that the answer is far more complex and that it is about choice. We can choose who we want to be. Nazi leadership chose the "Final Solution", SS officers chose to torture the camp inmates beyond what was required of them. Some have been tried in criminal courts while others have faced no worldly punishments. Outside the camp walls, the Poles who lived in the nearby city or who passed by the camp easily visible from the main thoroughfare out of the city towards Ukraine chose silence for many reasons - their own difficult existence in Nazi-occupied Poland, an ambivalence to the prisoners in the camp, or a variety of other reasons. While the Nazi perpetrators deserve the most severe judgment we can render, I think it is much more difficult to judge the bystanders to these crimes. We say we know what we would do - we would be the Righteous Gentile, benevolent kapo, resistance fighter - but in truth we can never know what we would have done to protect our selves or our families. We can never know the impossible choices that people faced in such extreme circumstances of fear, hunger, disease, death, and despair. Barbed wire and cremetorium at Majdanek But today we CAN choose - we get to choose what we do with what we know about the Holocaust, about other genocides in our time, such as Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s, or Syria today. We choose who we are in our communities - both locally and globally. We can choose to live our lives in a way that make the world a better place, to be a light in the world. We can choose to stand up to injustice when we see it and be advocates for tolerance and empathy. We can make choices that can change the world.
So that is what I choose. I choose love, tolerance, hope, and to carry the responsibility of what I have seen, what I have heard, and what I know was done, back to my own community. Comments are closed.
|
About the Trip
|