Krakow, Poland/On the Trail of The Holocaust

Despite the years, and perhaps because the Holocaust happened in my lifetime, it has been hard to look at the museums, the photographs, the actual places where the atrocities took place, and yet, being here in Krakow where much of the horrific activities were carried out, I’ve been compelled to visit the museums and the ghetto, the Jewish Quarters of Prague and Krakow, the Jewish cemeteries and Auschwitz. Lest we forget, here are some photos and words from my experiences.

Krakow

The Jewish Quarter

 Parts of "Schindler's List" were filmed here.

Mural in Jewish Quarter

?

At the Jewish Cemetery

Tight Quarters for Jewish Poles

In the Children's Room of the Jewish Museum
This hit home!

Jewish Museum

Holocaust Poland: Location of concentration camps

I feel the presence

of human ash and blood

As I walk the stone streets of Krakow

The faces of the old people

Many, witnesses to horrific crimes against humanity,

Seem sad.

Life for them has been hard

And their stories, if they were to share them,

Are of the rounding up and killing of the Jews

And then the communist occupation.

The SS troops' ways of killing were awful:

Starvation, slow death from freezing, bludgeoning

Gas chambers. Crematoriums.

People outside the camps smelled the stench

Of human flesh burning

And witnessed train cars filled with people:

Doctors, lawyers, scientists,

Engineers, teachers, mothers, creatives, and youth

Corralled like cattle

and systematically killed

or worked to death.

At Auschwitz
 I walked with my headset on
and listened to the guide,

respectful and somber,

as individuals wiped their eyes

and witnessed the remains:

a huge pile of shoes,

a tangled mountain of wire rimmed glasses,

bales of human hair shaved and used to make cloth.

On the walls the portraits of victims: hallow eyes in sunken sockets,

startled, sick, traumatized humans.

Feeling nauseous,

I left the tour and rested outside
 by a stone memorial.

I can’t stop visualizing the terror:

rampaging men

with their rifles and vicious dogs

brutally entering homes

and rounding up innocent victims.

The screaming and crying and deep trauma.

How could they have done this?

Baraks

"For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children, mainly Jews from various countries of Europe." 

Auschwitz-Birkenau

1940-1945

From Thomas Keneally's book, Schindler’s Arc, which became the movie "Schindler's List"

“To write these things now is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky, was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement in that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept. Throughout Europe that summer some millions of people, Oskar Schlindler among them, and the ghetto dwellers of Cracow too, tortuously adjusted the economies of their souls to the idea of Belzec-like enclosures in the Polish forests” 

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In the video clips at the museum, I saw Mamie’s street

and familiar landmarks of Krakow:

The Jewish Quarter, the ghetto, St. Mary’s Church, the synagogues

One generation, two generations, three generations later

the memories continue to horrify the visitors.

I only hope

that in the remembering

there will be enlightenment

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From Mamie's balcony, this is the view today. 

All is peaceful

as the city prepares for the Pope

who will be here in July.

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Jewish Cemetery
May they rest in peace.