Auschwitz and Birkenau

"Work will set you free"

Jim and I visited Dachau on our first trip to Germany in 1976 and I have never forgotten the hot summer day we wandered around the grounds and reflected on the horror of what happened there.  In intervening years I have read (three times)  Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" in which he recounts his time in Auschwitz.  In the forward to the book Harold Kushner remarks that the book is less about what Frankl  suffered and endured but more about how he survived.  Frankl himself quotes Nietzsche, " He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How." This is the message I find so helpful at those times in life when life itself seems  to have lost its meaning.  In my own life that was in 1996 when I was blindsided by a second cancer, in 2001 when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center fell and so many innocent people died within,  and in 2011 when my mother died in a manner that troubled and confused me.

Because he has been such an inspiration to me in these (by comparison) small challenges in life I feel as if I "know" someone who was in this awful place and I visited it with Viktor Frankl in my mind. He had already described the places so clearly to me and they were so much as I had pictured them - the overcrowd barracks, the train tracks, selection platform, gas chambers and crematorium.  When I gazed at the railroad car on the tracks at Birkenau I shuddered to be in this place. As many as 100 people were crammed so tightly in a railroad care such as this. Some  crouched on the floor while others crowded around the small barred peep holes which were the only source of light and fresh air. The transport could last for days and many did not survive the trip.

Our tour group walked mostly single file and quieter than on any other day as we went from room to room guided by a appropriately sober woman who had tears in her eyes as she told us to "take pictures and show them to everyone - let all the world know what happened here."

I have a copy of "Man's Search for Meaning" at home but at tour's end I headed for the small shop to purchase another and it's this one I will treasure as a lasting momento of the hot summer afternoon I walked where Viktor Frankl suffered but survived.