Passing Trains (Part 5): Auschwitz, a reflection

For the most part, walking through the museum, I found it difficult to initially connect with it much. It seemed so far removed, something I couldn't fully understand, and found myself feeling a sense of disbelief. I would stand looking at the exhibitions and find myself thinking, well, there it is, and not really comprehending what I was looking at. It seemed more natuaral than I thought it would be. Before hand, I kept thinking it was going to be some dramatic turning point in my life, or something out this world that would move me, but it felt more like, well, here it is. Yup, that is a pile of hair. Yup, those are suit cases. Yup, those are shoes. But it seemed hard to connect what I was looking at to the material I had been reading before hand. I what these things were, but seeing them didn't seem like one would expect. Looking back on it has more of an impact than the actual time spent in the museum. There is a general consensus that one sort of walks through the place quietly and take it in, but how does one take something like this in. The mind doesn't know how. I liked the way our tour guide, very simply, told us what to do. When we came to the shoes and the suit cases, all she said was, "Please walk around this room." There was no need for further explanation. She just kept repeating that until we all walked through. The place was full of others on tours, including children on a high school trip. I found it odd that as I walked out of one prison block I noticed some of them smiling and laughing at me over my height (a common occurrence in most of my life). It was like I could have been anywhere. The two more disturbing parts was the gas chamber, and the perhaps the photos of the prisoners put up on one of the walls, which the Nazis took of every prisoner for their records. At the end of the trip, we all stopped at the memorial. And wasn't really sure what to do. Everyone in the group separated into different places around the destroyed gas chambers. Again, I wasn't really able to get my mind to connect with any of it really. There were Jews near the side of it, waving an Israeli flag, and singing. Apparently we had happened to be there on a special day of remembrance, and so there were a lot of little groups there singing songs. I sat and listened, and thought about where I was and what had happened. It seemed like a place. I don't really know how else to describe it. It was just a "place".