I have taken a while to process this trip and part of me still doesn't feel like I should talk about it. After reading the Ruth Klueger book part of me felt like going here was against the survivor's wills but I really believe that going is important.
On the bus ride there I felt mixed about this trip. I was having fun chatting with people that weren't sleeping. It seemed like everyone was trying to sleep and not think about where we were heading.
When there at first it didn't hit me until we were standing in the room where they burned the bodies. The scenery was so beautiful with rolling hills and trees dotting the landscape had been able until this moment to distract me from where I was. It just seemed so unreal and I couldn't imagine just tossing several bodies in at a time. The second room after this was a plain room and we were supposed to stand there and wait for the rest of the group to finish looking at the memorial photographs until the tour moved on. But as I stood there something in that room made me panic. It felt different than the others. It seemed angry and unsettling. The empty room had held something at one point that was communicating to me somehow and I had the sudden urge to do anything to get out of there at once. In a few minutes our guide told us that this was where they would stack the bodies and store them until they were to be burned.
An important point that was made about the holocaust was that it was not done by crazy people. They were normal people that under particular circumstances used incredible creativity in tormenting other humans.
The stairway of death really made an impact on me. It was really disorienting to walk down them and almost impossible to walk back up them. I could never had carried a rock up them. How these people survived as long as they did is incredible.
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