Main Article

A Trip into Hell
By Josh Wander

(January 28) - What started out as a simple vacation to Prague turned out to be an incredibly educational trip. My wife and I decided that we would travel to Auschwitz to see the concentration camp where so many were killed, but what we experienced was more than we had planned.

The mood was grim as we took the train from Prague to Cracow. Soon we realized that we were riding on the same train tracks used almost 60 years ago to send over a million Jews to their deaths.

We arrived in Cracow early in the morning and met up with a Polish driver who agreed to take us to the camp. After about an hour we arrived at Auschwitz and we were asked where we were from. Later we were told that this was for the purpose of statistics.

We were greeted by a non-Jewish Polish guide. She took us through the camp and although her English was not her mother tongue, she managed to convey to us to the best of her ability, the enormous tragedy that occurred there.

We passed by the ramp where the infamous Dr. Mengele made his selection as to who would live and who would die. At one point my wife and daughter entered what was once a women's barracks in Birkenau, with a chill and what they described as a "weird feeling" they had to rush outside. It seems that the spirits are the only thing that live on in Auschwitz.

We saw Polish middle-school children taking their obligatory tour of the site. Giggling, as school children do, we wondered whether they really understood what had happened there.

We thought we would be deeply moved by the the tour, instead we walked from one barrack to the next in silent shock. It was probably the fact that we did not have a deep emotional experience that hit us the most.

Just quietness and sadness...

Only after hours and days of thought did it begin to dawn upon us that no one can really comprehend what happened in Auschwitz.

It was too big, too sad.