Stories

It rained in Auschwitz that day. A fitting tribute- tears from Mother Nature for a land already saturated with grief, loss, despair, and death. Sometimes a rainstorm is just a rainstorm, but it's impossible to ignore the meaning, the symbolism in everyday things when viewed through the lens of the Holocaust.

I've hesitated to try to describe my visit to Auschwitz. Even the word "visit" seems insincere. We visit neighbors, family, friends. We visit zoos, hospitals, parks. We visit when we chat, gossip, connect with other people. It's a word that conjures positive associations- not the reality of time spent in the acres that witnessed unprecedented human misery, suffering, murder.
Somehow any words I could use to describe the camp would be weak and insufficient. How could mere words possibly capture the vast weight and silence that blanket the land and buildings? 

So I won't try.

It's all about the stories anyway. I used to hear the numbers- six million, eleven million- and shake my head with sorrow over those lost voices, lost stories. Now, though, I know those numbers are merely starting points. For every person who died the most sorrowful of deaths there is another person who survived- and that person has a story too. What of the children of Holocaust survivors? Their stories of childhood shaped by loss, fear, and uncertainty must be counted. What of the stories of all the friends, acquaintances, lovers whose lives were touched, however briefly, by the people who survived, died, or were affected by the Holocaust?  Shouldn't their stories count too? 

One of our tour guides made a statement that I can't forget. Six million people weren't murdered in the Holocaust. One person was murdered, and it happened six million times. Voices are not statistics, and remembrance is about individuals, not numbers.