Some closing thoughts....for now...

"And I know one thing more - that the Europe of the future cannot exist without commemorating all those, regardless of their nationality, who were killed at that time with complete contempt and hate, who were tortured to death, starved, gassed, incinerated and hanged..." Andrzej Szczypiorski, prisoner at Sauchsenhausen

I have been home for two days and Poland seems like a million miles away. As I return to my daily routines I frequently return to the senses of our trip. The sight of the incineration chimneys, the sounds of nature all around these places of horror, the smell of the musty barracks and storage facilities. They are with me forever. They live in me now and it will take time to get used to them.

I was not able to fully keep up with my blog while I was traveling. At some point I decided that it was important to focus on the experience. I took over 2000 pictures; wrote hundreds of notes. At times, the camera was a barrier to what we were experiencing. It was better for me to see, hear, discuss, and sometimes cry my way through them.

There is no way to summarize my experience. However, one major themes stand out. That being, that the objective was as much to learn about how these people lived, as it was to understand and appreciate how they died. To that end I enjoyed and was taken by how the Jews of Europe lived prior to the war and it brought me great personal joy to see how much of the Jewish culture and community had been restored to parts of Europe. It is an enduring testament to the resilience of the Jewish culture; a flame that cannot be extinguished.

There is a personal connection to my history as well....my family goes back many generations in Poland. At a stop in Poland a man asked me where I was originally from....only at that moment did it occur to me that, had the holocaust not happened, I would have been from Poland.

How will we carry the legacy of what the Jews of Europe endured and keep it relevant to students and younger generations? For me the answer is simple, while we continue grow in understanding, we teach those who do not yet know. That is how generational memories are preserved and protected.

I feel grateful for the Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem and all of the incredible individuals who give their time, dedication and energy to educate at the various sites that commemorate these events. I take a vow to do my best to honor the memory of those who perished.

Special thanks...

Mr. Stanley Greenspon

Marty Birnbaum and Roslyn Greenspon

The Blumenthal Foundation

The Jewish Federation of Greater Charlotte and Sue Worrel
The Levine-Sklut Judaic Library and Andrea Mesoznik
The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Decedents
Vladka and Ben Meed
http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/meed-vladka
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007256
Stephen Feinberg
The Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teacher Program
My fellow participants who were an inspiration
My husband and children for supporting me and allowing me to experience this journey
My grandparents and parents

And a special thank you to Elaine Culbertson for her shoulder to cry on, compassion, zest for life and for being willing to share her stories with me.

Sachsenhausen

Today we took the road to Sachsenhausen. It is amazing to me how picturesque it is here, there is beauty everywhere. There are documented stories about Jews who hid in the woods we passed to escape capture. It gives them a special quality of being more than just a forest...It's indescribable.

Sachsenhausen opened in 1936 as a POW camp. The SS established the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as the principal concentration camp for the Berlin area.

By the end of 1946 the camp housed Jews, homosexuals (males only, gay women were not persecuted), Jehovah's Witnesses and Roma and Sinti (often refereed to as "Gypsies.")

The number of Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen varied over the course of the camp's existence, but ranged from 21 at the beginning of 1937 to 11,100 at the beginning of 1945. During the nationwide Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") operation in November of 1938, Chief of German Police Heinrich Himmler ordered the arrest of up to 30,000 Jews. The SS transported those arrested to Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Buckenwald concentration camps. Almost 6,000 Jews arrived in Sachsenhausen in the days following theKristallnacht riots.

Extract from the trial of Anton Kaindl,
former commandant of Sachsenhausen Death Camp

- Public Prosecutor: What kind of exterminations were committed in your camp?
- Kaindl: Until mid of 1943, prisoners were killed by shooting or hanging. For the mass exterminations, we used a special room in the infirmary. There was a height gauge and a table with an eye scope. There were also some SS wearing doctor uniforms. There was a hole at the back of the height gauge. While a SS was measuring the height of a prisoner, another one placed his gun in the hole and killed him by shooting in his neck. Behind the height gauge there was another room where we played music in order to cover the noise of the shooting.
- Public Prosecutor: Do you know if there was already an extermination procedure in Sachsenhausen when you became commandant of the camp?
- Kaindl: Yes, there were several procedures. With the special room in the infirmary, there was also an execution place where prisoners were killed by shooting, a mobile gallows and a mechanical gallows which was used for hanging three or four prisoners at the same time.
- Public Prosecutor: Did you change anything in these extermination procedures?
- Kaindl: In march 1943, I introduced gas chambers for the mass exterminations.
- Public Prosecutor: Was it your own decision?
- Kaindl: Partially yes. Because the existing installations were too small and not sufficient for the exterminations, I decided to have a meeting with some SS officers, including the SS Chief Doctor Baumkotter. During this meeting, he told me that poisoning of prisoners by prussic acid in special chambers would cause an immediate death. After this meeting, I decided to install gas chambers in the camp for mass extermination because it was a more efficient and more humane way to exterminate prisoners.
- Public Prosecutor: Who was responsible for the extermination?
- Kaindl: The commandant of the camp.
- Public Prosecutor: So, it was you?
- Kaindl: Yes.
- Public Prosecutor: How many prisoners were exterminated in Sachsenhausen while you were commandant of the camp?
- Kaindl: More than 42,000 prisoners were exterminated under my command, this number include 18,000 killed in the camp itself.
- Public Prosecutor: And how many prisoners died by starvation during this same period?
- Kaindl: I think 8,000 prisoners died by starvation during this period.
- Public Prosecutor: Accused Kaindl, did you receive the order to destroy any evidence of the murders committed in the camp?
- Kaindl: Yes. On February 1st, 1945, I had a conversation with the chief of the Gestapo, Muller. He ordered me to destroy the camp with artillery bombing, aerial bombing or by spraying gas. But due to technical problems, this order coming directly from Himmler was impossible to fulfill.
- Public Prosecutor: Suppose that there was no technical problem, would you have carried out this order?
- Kaindl: Of course. But it was impossible. An artillery or an aerial bombing was impossible to hide from the local population. And spraying gas was too dangerous for the local population and the SS.
- Public Prosecutor: What did you do then?
- Kaindl: I had a meeting with Hohn and some others SS and I ordered to exterminate all the ill prisoners, those who were unable to work and, the most important, all the political prisoners.
- Public Prosecutor: Was this order fulfilled?
- Kaindl: Yes, partially. During the night of February 2th, the first prisoners were killed. There were plus or minus 150 prisoners. Until end of March 1945, we succeed in killing more than 5,000 prisoners.
- Public Prosecutor: Who was in charge of this operation?
- Kaindl: Accused Hohn was in charge of this operation.
- Public Prosecutor: How many prisoners were in the camp at this time?
- Kaindl: Approximately 45,000. On April 18th I was ordered to embark all the prisoners on barges and to conduct the barge on the Baltic sea where I had to sink it. But we had not enough time to find enough barges for so many prisoners because the Red Army was advancing too fast.
- Public Prosecutor: What happened then?
- Kaindl: I ordered the evacuation of all the prisoners able to walk, first in direction of Wittstock, then to Lubeck where they had to embark on ships and sunk.
- Public Prosecutor: Did the prisoners received any care during this evacuation?
- Kaindl: No. 7,000 prisoners received nothing because we had nothing to give them.
- Public Prosecutor: Did these prisoners died by starvation during this Death March?
- Kaindl: Yes.

Inspired by the sign at Auschwitz

Watch tower, the sight instilled terror in the prisoners

Used for manual labor

No one escaped from here...there is a town directly behind this wall.

Memorial

The first group of Soviet prisoners of war arrived in Sachsenhausen at the end of August 1941. By the end of October 1941, the SS had deported about 12,000 Soviet prisoners of war to Sachsenhausen. Camp authorities shot thousands of the Soviet POWs shortly after they arrived in the camp. Estimates of Soviet POWs killed at Sachsenhausen range from 11,000-18,000. There was no records kept of these Soviet POWs.

Burial Ground

Double barrier to make gas chamber sound proof

Auschwitz I and Birkenau, July 12

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”

- Elie Wiesel Survivor

This is the famous tree at the entrance to Auschwitz. Survivor, Adolf Gawalewics wrote of this tree:

“A tree can be seen hard by the entrance to the camp, to the right of the gate inscribed ‘Arbeit macht frei.’ This is no ordinary tree! Beneath it stood the tormented parents and siblings of a prisoner who had escaped. Here, also, stood those whose escape attempts had failed. They stood with their skin ripped by the claws of the dogs, holding a sign reading ‘Hurra! Ich bin wieder da!’ (Hurrah, I’m back!) as a warning to the labor details returning from work.”

There is no way for me to express what spending the day in Aushwitz was like. It is something that everyone should experience for themselves. It was one of the most difficult experiences that I have ever had, but I am so thankful to have the opportunity to experience it.

Auschwitz is a concentration camp complex and was the largest of its kind established by the Nazi regime. It included three main camps, Aushwitz I (May 1940); Aushwitz II/Auschwitz-Birkenau, in 1942 and Auschwitz III/Aushwitz-Monowitz in October 1942.

Aushwitz I was established in the town of Oswiecim. My grandmother was born in that town - just driving through it was very meaningful to me. The location was picked due to its central location in Europe. It was previously an abandoned Polish army artillery barracks. Originally, the prisoners who arrived were political prisoners but later the camp broadened it's focus to include all "enemies of Germany".

On the bus ride there the silence was deafening. We are usually quiet after visiting a site, but I have never heard such a heavy silence on the way to a camp. Upon arrival our program Director, Elaine shared a moving story about her mother's experience at Auschwitz. I don't think that there was a dry eye in the group. It was especially meaningful because one of the goals of this trip is to breakdown the number (6 million) into meaningful stories that people can relate to. Elaines' mother lost her entire family. During her time at Auschwitz she almost lost her will to live...she shared the details of her sister dying during a work detail from a burn. At the end of the day they had to bring her body back to the camp because everyone had to be accounted for; dead or alive.

I have been thinking about Auschwitz and reading about Auschwitz for years. As I approached I found it difficult to breathe. Our guide was incredible, she is in charge of putting together the new exhibit that will be opening in the future in Auschwitz. She shared with us the challenges of preserving such a visited historic sight. Over 1.5 visitors a year come to Auschwitz. As we entered I saw the special tree that I had read so much about.