Excerpt from “The Impossible Real”: Remaining Homeless in the Study of the Holocaust

I was just looking for writing samples to send to Pathfinder, an organization I recently had an interview with. It was difficult deciding what piece to send, but as I was searching I came across a piece I did my freshman year that was published in Witt's journal, Spectrum. I really love it, and it made me think a lot because it's about my first trip to Israel and Poland. I wonder if Kelsey will see and feel a lot of the same things I felt. How will she respond to the devastation of Poland? The spirituality of Israel? The beauty to find in all that is life? Well, anyway. I decided the piece was much too morbid for a writing sample submission, but I thought I'd share a bit of it here, because I really find it powerful.

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While standing on that sacred ground, I was assailed by the memory of the six horrendous death camps I had recently visited in Poland. I remember understanding Holocaust survivor Ezer Wietzman’s statement that, “I don’t find it easy to walk about in that country and to hear the voices calling out to me from the land” (Israel-Poland 1), all too clearly. For an entire week, the hairs on the back of my neck had stood straight up and a feeling of nausea had been impossible to avoid. In my mind, I could hear the screams and see the hands of the millions murdered reaching up from the ground.

I stood in the gas chambers where innocent men, women, and children were murdered with no mercy. These death chambers still had visible scratch marks on the walls from the thousands of attempts to escape and to call for help. People had been pleading for life, for their families, and for their homes. I tried to imagine the terror, the screams, the loss of all hope. I glanced into the dark ovens where human beings were burned only because of their beliefs and culture. I stared at the chimneys where the smoke rose, never to be seen again. I gazed out over great expanses of grassy fields that are not merely fields, but sites of mass murder.

I remembered Morten Steinfeld, a boy I promised myself I would never let be forgotten, who had been my age, eighteen, in the year 1943. He was exterminated in Gas Chamber One upon his arrival at Auschwitz, according to the records at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and memorial in Israel (Yad Vashem). I walked among millions of shoes, each one belonging to a person at one time, a person just like me; a person who could have been in my family, or a person who could have been my friend. I thought about the phrase “walking in someone else’s shoes,” and I was terrified.

I remembered, like an image burned forever into my mind, standing in the midst of Sobibor, the least well-known of the six death camps located within Poland, staring at a gigantic mound of human ash and rock. I saw the ashes, the tons and tons of ashes. I had learned that one murdered soul, when burned, was equivalent to just seven ounces of ash. I shuddered as I tried to imagine how many thousands of innocent people that meant the mound in front of me held. My stomach turned, and I had to look away. Unlike my firm rock, these ashes are insubstantial. They slip away into nothingness. They seemed to whisper that we “all come from the dust and all return to the dust” (Holy Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:20). The contrast between my rock and the ashes before me emphasized the difference between my reality, filled with hope, and that of the Holocaust victims, filled with despair.

Walking up the path, we encountered a large, rough, rusty-looking, stone statue of a woman looking up to the sky, with a child nestled at her side. The roughly carved bottom with no definitive lines made it look as if the woman were rising above her anguish. I could see the agony in her face, but her chin was still held high. She knew her destiny, yet she continued on with pride, comforting her child along the way. Her courage and strength, despite her imminent death, could be seen in the hard, stone statue. I remember standing there in awe as our tour guide, Orit, began the story of the torture, murder, and the pure evil that occurred on that very soil, and how, despite all this, the victims of the Holocaust still had hope and continued to yearn for their freedom.

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