by Cara Erdheim Kilgallen (Trumbull, CT)
I entered the gruesome gates of Auschwitz on a recent journey to Poland with my parents and husband. Half-way through our guided tour, my stoic husband Bill turned to me and said, “I feel like throwing up.”
The humid June air did not help our collective nausea. As the sun beat down upon our shoulders, the four of us toured two of the darkest death camps from history and witnessed true Holocaust horror.
As a Jew with family members who perished in the Shoah, I had always felt determined to visit Auschwitz. My eighty-three-year-old Dad, a Jewish former Marine who proudly wears a Star of David that says, “never again,” came along. So did my mom, a seventy-seven-year-old dynamo who has worked as a psychoanalyst with Holocaust victims and their children. Bill, my Catholic husband, wanted to experience history and planned the entire trip. It had been on our bucket list for sure.
We began with Auschwitz, designed initially as barracks for the Polish Army, and then moved onto the darkest death and extermination site, Birkenau. The structures at Auschwitz still stood, but they somehow didn’t feel real and the buildings almost resembled college dorms from the outside. When I walked inside, the death site became more palpable. Hairbrushes, belts, shirts, toothbrushes, and other discarded items from various victims highlighted the utter inhumanity of it all. We began the brief bus ride to Birkenau, the neighboring camp, which was worse.
“Brace yourselves,” warned our guide Chris. This next site will be tougher to take.”
“More difficult than this?” I asked incredulously while thinking about the gas showers we had just seen.
“Sadly, yes,” Chris responded.
Birkenau, the adjoining death camp to Auschwitz, made us all even sicker.
As Bill and I stood in shock staring at the piles of wood upon which victims slept, Chris explained how those on the top bunks often bled onto those below. The prisoners slept in old horse barns, each one of them containing hundreds of innocent human beings. I wondered if they received blankets in winter and learned that groups of twelve or so sleepers were sometimes allowed one small sheet. We stood inside these cramped quarters, which smelled like death.
My shock and sorrow manifested in an intense back pain that I had never felt before. There was no place to sit on our three hour walk through dark dungeons and barren barracks. Feeling too guilty to rest amidst all of the documented human suffering that we witnessed, I tried to stretch out my back as the tour guide led us into a room filled with children’s shoes displayed in a large case secure behind a glass wall.
Until this point, I had not cried at all, perhaps out of sheer shock; however, as the mother of a toddler, I could not contain myself at this point and my eyes filled with tears. I thought instantly about my daughter, back home in the United States with excellent caregivers, and juxtaposed this privilege against the extreme evils. The Nazis robbed every ounce of innocence from these young lives, for no reason other than their difference, which most often was their Jewish identity.
We learned about the pride that those running the camp took in exterminating as many victims as possible. Chris told us that the Nazis viewed destruction as economic productivity and recorded their killings with precise record keeping. Furthermore, so many corporations profited from this loss. Human hair from the deceased was used for clothing, and gold teeth were removed from mouths of the dead.
Survivor and author Eli Wiesel has written and spoken poetically about the overwhelming silence at Auschwitz. I felt this quiet all throughout our visit, and my normally inquisitive self held most of my questions until the end.
“As we conclude our journey today, I would like to leave space and time for questions,” Chris kindly offered as though he sensed my overwhelming curiosity and that of my mother the psychologist.
“Have you encountered any Holocaust denial in any of your visitors?” My Mom jumped in almost immediately.
“Just once,” Chris responded. “A man on one of my tours questioned why a picture contained no chimney smoke and claimed that this absence meant no gas chambers. I countered him immediately with the truth that this very photo had documented a factory in Krakow, not the death camp, which contained countless ashes and human remains as evidence.”
I marveled at Chris’s calmness, intelligence, and sensitivity. He explained that he and his wife had met giving tours at Auschwitz and felt more determined than ever to educate their young children on these historic atrocities.
“Although it would have made our commute to work easier, we stopped short of moving closely to the camps,” Chris emphasized when I remarked about the tennis courts down the road. “We want them to be Holocaust aware, but having our home on site was too close for comfort.”
“Of course,” we all responded, and then discussed the clear contrast between Chris’ humane response with that of the Nazi Commander who chose to live and raise his family, children playing in the yard and all, on top of the gas chambers.
My family and I left the site of Holocaust horror, and immediately saw a woman run to the bathroom to vomit. The one silver lining was that others had felt touched and moved by this experience. They recognized and respected the most profoundly painful parts of human history.
How could I not have journeyed here before? Why did it take my Catholic husband to plan such a trip for my Jewish parents and me? My Mother had travelled with a friend twenty-five years ago to Auschwitz, but she has always felt determined to return with family.
Bill, who had felt profoundly moved by reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning at his Catholic high school, made it happen. A survivor of multiple concentration camps, Frankl founded Logotherapy after his entire family perished in the Holocaust; he spent his life empowering others to discover purpose within their own lives.
My intergenerational Odyssey to Auschwitz and Birkenau has strengthened an interfaith marriage, solidified firm family bonds, and made each moment of life feel all the more meaningful and precious.
Cara Erdheim Kilgallen is a mother, an author, an academic, an athlete, and a professor who truly treasures family and friendship. She is dedicated to teaching literature and writing, as well as a lifelong ice skater and someone who is deeply passionate about sport (particularly tennis and golf). Raised culturally Jewish, Cara deeply values her roots and embraces Judaism as foundational to the Judeo-Christian tradition and beyond. She hopes for more interfaith and intercultural dialogue. Cara hopes that through Jewish storytelling, this piece speaks to the horrors of all human suffering, which the world sadly has far too much of at present.
The Jewish Writing Project 