by Jennifer Galvin

Created on: January 17, 2010

I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

I wanted to say that it had changed my life. I wanted to say that things felt different now, but they don't. It simply reinforced what I already knew, what I already felt. Though this place is not the full extent of the Holocaust, the Shoah, the genocide itself, it is how our Western minds envisage it. We understand a language of watchtowers, huts, selections, gas chambers, crematoria. We understand that the only way out of this place is up the chimney.

Millions died here. The exact figure, disputed as it is, fades into insignificance when faced with all the everyday realities of life here. Millions died elsewhere too. I want to remember them too; those faceless masses shot in the East, those who died in the ghettos, every last man, woman or child who didn't deserve to live, or so they said. Shivering here in this ghostly place, I remember that people were murdered in every country between Paris and Moscow, and all the countless others who were robbed of everything from their livelihoods to their loved ones.

Auschwitz I is eerily neat beneath the snow, the straight lines of the wires, neatly placed brick barracks, the perpendicular lines of the gallows, all nestled beneath that infamous taunt "Arbeit Macht Frei". Work brings nothing at all, even to the most industrious, except another day of suffering. I am humbled by the cold, more than anything else; I shiver in my four jumpers and a coat, enormous mittens built for a Siberian wind, but you in your wooden clogs and those striped pajamas, how did you go on at all? I am struck by the resilience of those people who survived here, if only for weeks or months. I'm not sure I'd last a day out here, amongst all this fear and these snowdrifts.

So many trappings of human life lay hidden amongst those walls. Corridors with so many human faces staring back, yet to be starved, beaten or overworked, yet to fall sick with typhus or dysentery, yet to become those hollow shells of the liberation or the frozen death masks of corpses. Their eyes are alive and awake and brimming over with fear and trepidation. Their names, their birth dates, their dates of death. These people are more real now than ever before, now that I see their faces here. In other rooms, incessant piles of battered tin pots, shoes, brushes, spectacles, an endless stream of ownership that ends on the ramp. Your possessions and your name are taken from you, and replaced with a number.

People don't part easily with their hair.

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