My fingers tread lightly on the keys here. We visited a graveyard. It is a solemn place and a preserved site of one of the greatest human atrocities. It is a place whose continued existence is necessary for the world to learn from the past but it is also a place that should be razed and turned to dust. I walked the campus of infamous Auschwitz in silence. Few places or persons have stirred me as this visit did. The injustice is palpable. The injustice overwhelms like the dust of an erupted volcano. Rooms of discarded shoes. Rooms of uselessly towed family valuables. Rooms of shaved human hair. In the underground gas chamber I felt as a trespasser. I am more educated for having visited but I felt guilty – possibly for being a part of a global human community capable of such things. I detest prisons and I detest injustice.
8/22/11
Auschwitz
My fingers tread lightly on the keys here. We visited a graveyard. It is a solemn place and a preserved site of one of the greatest human atrocities. It is a place whose continued existence is necessary for the world to learn from the past but it is also a place that should be razed and turned to dust. I walked the campus of infamous Auschwitz in silence. Few places or persons have stirred me as this visit did. The injustice is palpable. The injustice overwhelms like the dust of an erupted volcano. Rooms of discarded shoes. Rooms of uselessly towed family valuables. Rooms of shaved human hair. In the underground gas chamber I felt as a trespasser. I am more educated for having visited but I felt guilty – possibly for being a part of a global human community capable of such things. I detest prisons and I detest injustice.
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2 comments:
I just did an article on the site on my visit in 1998, which still gives me goosebumps and almost brings me to tears still today. http://onmyfeetorinmymind.blogspot.com/2011/08/sad-somber-my-visit-to-auschwitz.html
Roel Jr. your comments about Auschwitz remind me of the travels I made to sites where the people of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce were massacred by the 13th Cavalry. Oppression is oppression and there is no hierarchy of oppression. The atrocities committed at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and lynching of African slaves are America’s Auschwitz we should never forget.
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