Written by Ella Nahmiyas, Yallah! Israel 2024 participant
Happy July! Breakfast was another morning of rushing to be on time and getting used to Polish cuisine. Then we got on the bus to truly begin our trip to Auschwitz. The best way for me to describe it is “wow.” It was extremely impactful, powerful, and sad.
First, we started by walking through a tunnel where we heard the names of those who perished at the camp. We then went through the camp and observed many different aspects of it, including where they held roll call, the infirmary, and many artifacts. We watched videos of Jewish life before the war, seeing people singing and dancing in the streets. It made us realize how quickly life for the Jews changed, from happiness and peace to terror and heartbreak.
We watched videos of Holocaust survivors sharing their stories before we looked at the Book of Names. For me, this was the most powerful part. Aside from the fact that the book was very tall with many pages, there were also multiple pages with the same name over and over again. While this room was hard to witness, it was also where I felt the most emotion and the most connected to the event and my history.
We then had a ceremony where we said Kaddish for all our family members who perished, whether in Auschwitz or another camp. We continued on to see all of the personal belongings that were taken away from the inmates when they arrived: the shoes, hair, prosthetics, pottery, and suitcases. These rooms were also very impactful as they made it clear that the prisoners were not seen or treated as humans, but as animals and things.
The last things we looked at were cans of Zyklon-B, the chambers, and the crematorium. These were arguably some of the hardest parts of the tour to experience and the most surreal. It really hit some of us that innocent people were tortured, killed, and burned here. While it was a very emotional morning, we all agreed on how important it is for anyone, Jews and non-Jews, to see the place where this terror occurred, to remember what happened.
Afterwards, we all gathered in a circle to process and sing together.
