When you are standing in human ash, trying not to cry, you begin to wonder at the cruelty of people. Not necessarily the people around you, who are also fighting the tears and the rain, but the faceless perpetrators of crimes against humanity. Such people long ago joined their victims as dust, but their efforts scarred the world irrevocably. At first you think, how could they? The monsters! Then, you realize that they were humans, too. People just like you. Then you think, could I?
     People often ask me why I chose to visit concentration camps over my summer break. I laugh and tell them I am a masochist – my not-so-subtle attempt at avoiding their question. The truth, though, is that I was lured into the trip by a very compelling sales pitch. Our leaders reminded me that Holocaust victims were getting older, and that soon they would not be able to tell their stories. Huge parts of history, gone! So I reminded myself of my crucial role, as an academic, to chronicle history, and I went.
     We studied for a week at Western before we left for Poland – videos, films, books. Even still, nothing prepares you for the horror you see in the camps. Our first stop was Auschwitz. As I walked through the gates, I said, “oh, God.” It wasn’t an expletive, it was a prayer, sort of like, “oh God, how could you allow this?” We walked along the dirt roads, under a clear blue sky, and tried to envision the camps as they once were. Although nature seemed to cover over the horror of the camp, there were obvious reminders in other places. Fingernail marks on the walls of the chambers, enduring traces of dying men and women clawing for air. A wall covered with flowers – the killing wall. Sunken-in plots of land; mass graves. Rooms full of shoes. Cases full of human hair, meticulous braids intact.
     Despite the pervasive sadness of the camps, I didn’t cry. This was enormously surprising – I cried at Akeelah and the Bee, so I fully expected to sob at Auschwitz. For the first time in my life, I was too sad to cry. I instead became very nauseous. I couldn’t even process the things I was seeing because my body was revolting. I contemplated whether I was dying. I started praying again (it is astounding how religious one becomes in Auschwitz). “God, please help me through this. Help me just survive.” This prayer seemed a bit funny to me, after I offered it up. I’ll bet God had heard that one before.
     One concentration camp should be enough for anyone. Yet, we loaded our bus another day and drove out to Treblinka, another camp. This camp was like a nature preserve – lush and green, with no remnants of barracks or chambers. Of course, there were never many barracks to begin with – people were brought here to die. Our guide, Halina, told us that her father had died in this camp. We walked along the symbolic limestone railroad, past the symbolic limestone gas chamber, to a single stone in a sea of 17,000 stones. Each stone in the mass represented a single village – not a person, but a community. We stopped at the Warsaw stone and had a memorial service for Halina’s father. One of my friends read a poem that Halina had written to her father, describing the sadness she felt at his absence and the things in her life she had wanted him to see. I though of my father. For a moment, I saw myself in Halina. I would be devastated without my father. I could not imagine knowing that the government wanted him dead. Not just killed, but exterminated like an animal. Not the hero I believed him to be, not even a person. I could not imagine.
     That’s the thing about travel – history becomes intensely personal. It wasn’t just a concentration camp anymore, it was a vivid picture etched forever in my memory. It was a field of human ash and memorial stones, washed by the cold Polish rain. It was a little candle fighting against the wind to burn in tribute to Halina’s father. It was my story, too.
     Treblinka was painful – a quiet kind of pain, more like arthritis than a broken bone. An ache changed by time, but never gone. In my mind, Treblinka stands in sharp contrast to Madanjek, our last camp. I was sick at Madanjek before we went through the gate. I filed through the tiny museum, arms crossed, listening to Halina tell us that her mother had died here. I thought of my mother. We walked outside into the cold, cloudy day (dark at midmorning). We passed under Stalin’s monument to the deceased, into a gas chamber. This chamber was a sterilized version of its former self – the bodies and their remnants were gone, but everything else remained; the Zyklon-B in the closets, the faux showerheads. Nail marks on the walls. Blue traces from the gas.
    We walked through the chamber in mortified silence. I wandered alone, looking at the coffee-can shaped containers of Zyklon-B…innocuous little tins, until you realized what they were used for. I peered through the peephole that Nazis had used to supervise their dying victims. All of the sudden, I could feel the thousands of people who had died in the chamber. I didn’t believe in ghosts or aliens, but the tiny chamber suddenly felt very hot and crowded. People everywhere. Mothers, babies, people like me – all crying and clawing at me. It was a nightmare. I couldn’t breathe. For a moment, I believed that I was going to die.
     I pushed through the crowd and sat down on the culvert outside the door. I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel. I couldn’t process. All I could think was, “I have to get out of Poland. I want to go home. I hate it here. I hate this.”  My friend Tedde came outside and sat down next to me. He asked if I was okay. I shook my head no. All of a sudden, the tears that I had been saving since Auschwitz started rolling down my cold, pale face. In that moment, I called out to God. I asked God to forgive humanity, the people just like me who had committed the crimes and people just like me who had died. I couldn’t speak. I just sat and cried, head in my hands, for what felt like a lifetime.
     Eventually, I pried myself off the culvert and returned to the United States. When I returned home, people asked about my trip but I didn’t want to talk about it. I couldn’t put it into words, and I didn’t want to think about it. Camps only crossed my mind in nightmares. I’m lucky, though – I saw the chambers. I felt death. But I survived - I woke up from the nightmare. Millions of others, people just like me, didn’t.
     I internalized innumerable lessons from my trip to Poland. Among them, I learned that we should not fear death. We learned that, in the camps, mothers would take their children’s hands and say, “We’ll die together. It won’t be so bad.” We won’t know about death until we experience it, but I suspect that it won’t be altogether awful. There are worse things than death. Like hate. Hate is worse than death. 
     More importantly, I learned that all people have inherent value. The problem with the Nazi genocide, and all other genocides from Rwanda to Sudan to Burma, is that somewhere someone decides that he or she is better than someone else, despite the reality that they are fundamentally similar. Underneath all of the ethnic, cultural, religious, miscellaneous differences, we are all just the same. People can argue all they want about democrats and republicans, men and women, gay and straight. It’s lies, all of it. When you are standing in human ash, fighting the rain, or in a gas chamber with spirits breathing in your face, everybody becomes eerily similar. People just like me – just like all of us – are capable of unspeakable evil. The good news is, they are also capable of sharing what they saw, imploring others to remember, and – ultimately – standing firmly against intolerance where it appears, so that no one else forgets the unparalleled value of life.

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     The S-bahn station was quiet in the late evening.  My host father waited with me for the train to take me into Munich, where I was going to get on a night train headed for Berlin.  Alone.  The other students in the program all had other plans for the long weekend.  But I still wanted to go.  I had booked the train for the trip both ways and had reserved a spot in a hostel online for the two nights I would be staying there.  My German professor, who was camped out in Berlin for the summer, was going to be meeting up with me.  I had made notes of some things that I might like to go see or do.  I had packed a bag for the weekend and had not forgotten to grab such items as my Eurail pass, passport, and money.  I had told my parents what I was doing, and their response emails ranged from incredulity to resignation at the fact that they had no influence from an ocean away.  Now all I had to do was get on the train.
     My host father engaged me in what he liked to call “small talk” while we were waiting – making conversation out of nothing so that I might practice my German skills.  I don’t remember anything about what was said.  My eyes were looking down the tracks.  My mind was anticipating a confirming text message from my German professor and trying desperately not to think about the whole ‘alone’ part of my impending trip.  I did not want to sacrifice the experience because I could not get anyone to partake in said experience with me, and I continued to remind myself that my desire to reach Berlin while I was in Germany was more powerful than any apprehension I had about traveling alone.  I wished that I was a more persuasive talker.
     I could see the lights on the front of the train as it approached the platform.  My host father wished me a pleasant weekend and waved to me as I stepped inside and the doors closed behind me.  The train shuddered to life again and I started looking around the car.  I was perhaps one of three people there.  I sat down close to the front and put my bag in the seat next to me.  As hard as I had tried to avoid it, one lone thought crept into my brain.
     Are you CRAZY?
     That’s the thing about Doubt: it slinks about and hides in the dark corners like the Formless Creatures in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones” who terrorize the main character, representing his unarticulated fears and doubts throughout the play.  My own Formless Creatures had crawled out from their hiding place in the shadows under the seats and left my thoughts paralyzed on that one question.  What made me think that I was capable of going to Berlin by myself and not freaking out or getting into some kind of trouble?  And what if I did have some sort of problem?  I was in a strange country traveling alone and could sort of speak the language if I thought about it hard enough before I opened my mouth.  But I was not a seasoned traveler, and had never traveled alone.
     I got off at the main station in downtown Munich and resisted the urge to hop on the line going back out of town.  I navigated to the correct platform easily enough, and then sipped hot chocolate to bolster my nerves and keep the Formless Creatures under the train tracks, silently hoping that the train would come and crush them beneath its weight.  The train was late.  A woman kept making announcements over an intercom system, but the sound was so distorted that I couldn’t understand it as it rained down from some ambiguous place above, much like the teacher’s voice from “Peanuts” always rained down on Charlie Brown.  I finally asked a woman that didn’t look like she would be bothered by some inept American kid asking her for help to explain to me what had been said.  She told me the train was on its way.
     There was a number on my reservation ticket that told me which seat I belonged in.  The sleeper car had these cubby hole-like “cabins” that were closed off by a large curtain for two people to share.  When I got onto the train, I discovered my bunk mate had already arrived and made himself comfortable on the pull-down top bunk.  That left me with the seats in the bottom.  I hunched down and slipped into one and shoved my bag under it. 
Once my ticket had been checked, I started trying to figure out how I might lie down.  I certainly didn’t want to try to sleep sitting up.  I thought that surely, surely there was a way for me to lower the seats or do something so that I could rest.  I messed with the seats for a while, and the longer nothing happened the more Formless Creatures kept slipping out of the dark and snickering at me.  Their laughter seemed to grow louder in my mind when I realized it was too late to back out – that the train was moving and I was on the ride for the duration unless I wanted to jump off at some random station along the way where I might not find a way back to Munich until morning.  The little darkened alcove was suddenly a little too dark.  And as panic about the fact that I was too dumb to work a seat on a train set in, I contemplated making a call to either Munich or Berlin and telling either the host family or my German professor that I had made a huge mistake and needed a way out.  The Formless Creatures loved it; they probably danced a jig around the perimeter of the curtain-enclosed space while my attention was on the chairs.
Finally, I discovered the lever on the underside of the seats that caused them to lie flat, and I almost by accident pulled the first chair down into the reclined position.  I might have fallen to my knees in front of the chair and almost cried when I realized I wasn’t a total idiot.  I sensed my Formless Creatures scurrying back to their hiding places.  I finished the seat transition, kicked off my shoes, and grabbed a pillow and blanket from the side bin.  All that was left to do was sleep.
I stayed awake only briefly.  I knew my Formless Creatures were still there, but they seemed less threatening once my eyelids started to get heavy.  The train ride, aside from the odd bump or lurch, was mostly kind of soothing, and I was soon asleep.  I woke up a time or two in the night.  Once I awakened when I heard the bunk mate rustling around in his things.  I started to move because I thought I was in his way, but he told me I was fine and that he was just looking for his shoes.  I did not see the Formless Creatures anymore, and quickly went back to sleep.
     Morning came early.  I slipped into my shoes, climbed out of the cubby hole, and walked to the front of the car, just to see what I could see from the uncovered windows.  The sun was rising and had painted the sky with vibrant, saturated hues of pink and orange.   I probably stood there for fifteen minutes or more, watching the landscape pass by and the slow progress of the sun in the sky.
     As we neared the city, the bunk mate awakened and started packing up his belongings.  I discovered that, judging from the boots, jacket, helmet, and Harley-Davidson shirt, he was a motorcyclist.  He and his companions in the next cubby hole got off at a stop at the outskirts of the city.  I was almost alone in the car by the last chunk of the trip.  I put the seats back into their original position without the appearance of Doubt or the Formless Creatures, and watched out the window as we neared downtown Berlin.
     When I got off the train, I saw nothing but swarms of people, none of which looked like my German professor.  I pulled out the cell phone the study abroad program had provided me and called her, and asked, “Where are you?”
     “Stay put.  I’ll be right there,” was her answer.
     And when I finally caught a glimpse of her, a new lone thought settled in my brain.
     You’re in Berlin.

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     Last summer, I experienced, with every sense of my body, the most atrocious act of human kind.  I walked through the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka. I ran my fingers over the gas chamber walls while impressions of fingernail scratches sent chills down my spine and images into my mind even the most horrible nightmare couldn't compete with.  I stood in the crematoria where the stench of death remains as strong today as it did when smoke still rose from the chimneys.  I heard the voices -- the screams and the cries.  I tasted their tears.  But nothing was as ear-piercing and heart-stopping as the silence.  Silence was the neighborhood in seeing-distance from the barbed-wire fences of the camp where half-skeletons stood staring out from empty souls -- souls ripped away from them.  They had no voices of their own, and no one spoke for them.  Silence was encompassed by the rest of the world.  They heard the rumors, read the news.  Those who didn’t deny it right away only frowned and then quickly forgot.  Hope was gone.  They were already dead...and no one cared.
     This experience changed my life.  Nothing is so powerful as actually standing on the ground where millions of people were tortured, shot, gassed, and burned into the atmosphere as if they never existed.   Reading about it can educate…it can evoke emotion.  It doesn’t grab onto you and refuse to let go. 
     I always knew I wanted to study abroad, but I hadn't the slightest idea where to go or what to study.  When I heard about the honors program sponsoring a Holocaust study in Poland and Israel and that we would be accompanied by survivors, I knew right away that trip was the one.  How could I pass up the opportunity to experience something I’ve read about since I was a child in such a realistic way?  Outside reactions to my summer plans varied little:  "Why would you do that? That's so depressing!",  "What does it have to do with your major?",  "If I were you, I'd go to Italy or London...or somewhere exotic".  I expected these reactions and I understand the opinions, but there was no doubt in my mind that it was an opportunity I had to take.  There is an entire movement of Holocaust deniers.  Evidence of the Holocaust is literally disintegrating everyday.  Survivors are dying and will soon be extinct.  Only word-of-mouth will carry their stories and teach the world of humankind’s true potential for hate.  I knew I had to be a part of that.  It was no hint.  It was a blatant calling, and the reactions I just mentioned only strengthened that calling because they made it more and more apparent how indifferent and apathetic people really are. 
      In the same way people were indifferent toward the Holocaust when it was in their own backyards, people are indifferent now…or uninformed.  No one wants to believe it's possible for a human being to savagely murder and burn thousands of women, children, and elderly every day.  This is why it is imperative to educate people.  Author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, "because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies."  When no one else cares, hope has no place.  Hope cannot exist in a world of indifference.  It is not hate, but indifference, that is the purest evil.  Indifference gives hate its power. 
     My true calling became very real in Treblinka, Poland.  Treblinka is the saddest place I have ever experienced.  Treblinka was the home of the second most deadly Nazi concentration camp.  I am ashamed to say I had never even heard of it before the trip.  Everyone hears of Auschwitz where at least a million lives were taken.  800,000 died at Treblinka.  It wasn’t a work camp, like Auschwitz….it was a death camp.  There were no barracks because they were not needed.  When you were deported to Treblinka, you got in the line that led to the gas chambers.  There was no hope for survival.  In fact, there were only about eighty survivors, and that is an even sadder story.  Treblinka was never liberated, like many of the others.  It closed because the Nazis deemed it “inefficient”…it wasn’t using the newer, more deadly technology that Auschwitz and others had.  Those who survived were those who ran the day the camp was closed.  It was their only hope, though most of them were shot as soon as they moved out of the line.    We were given this information about Treblinka before we got there.  As soon as we pulled up, the loneliness weighed on me like a ton of bricks.  I couldn’t even see anything…there wasn’t anything.  Everything was destroyed by the Nazis.  No other groups or people were there that day we were there.  The parking lot was very small and empty…the grass overgrown.  I knew no one ever came there.  There’s nothing to see…why drive all that way?  It knocked my off my feet – not only were their deaths silent in the years of Nazi occupation…but they remain silent today.  This was when I broke down.  Halina, the survivor we had with our group, rushed over to me.  At the site of her father’s death, she was comforting me.  She kissed my face and wiped my tears…she held on to me and didn’t let go until we were back on the bus.   How could someone who has experienced real hate, death, and evil be so full of hope and life?  Halina’s strength astonished and inspired me.
     Right then, I knew I couldn't let their deaths be silent anymore.  I couldn't deny human hate.  I wouldn't ignore the hundreds of genocides that occurred in the twentieth century and the one that's claiming lives in Darfur as I write.  I started my work soon after my return by giving multi-media presentations to church groups.  I had the fire in me, and all I wanted to do was spark a flame is someone else.  I spoke to anyone I could get my hands on about my experiences and my plans for the future.  I plan to expand my education and experience with human rights issues as much as possible, and use the communications skills I have acquired though my study of broadcasting to educate people on the very real capacity for human hate.  During a lecture before we left for Poland, Peter Yarrow spoke to us about the evolution of hate.  His theory has stuck with me and always will.  Hate is learned at a very early age…in children.  It starts as teasing and bullying the “different kid”.  It then evolves into adult biases and prejudice toward particular groups.  Then it becomes active discrimination which escalates into hate…and war…and genocide.  This cycle must be stopped in the beginning – in children.  It cannot be reversed.  It must be prevented.  We must stop teaching our children to hate.  My ultimate goal is to share and spread this theory as far as possible, because I believe in it with all my existence.  But there is something even more important.  This trip is called “The March of Remembrance and Hope”.  Remembrance is important.  Making people accept the existence of hate is imperative.  But the hope part is what will set us free.  Just as people are born with the potential for hate…they are also born with the potential for love.  Society brings hate out of us…but love is actually the more powerful of the two.  Before we can begin to change the world, we must first learn to love each other…wholeheartedly and unconditionally.  No matter our differences…we are all humans and we are all the same.  As a Christian, I believe we are taught above all else to have faith, hope, and love.  God tells us that the most important of these is love.
     To make my goals a reality…my dream profession would be to work in public relations for the Anti-Defamation League helping to inform people of the world-changing work ADL does and how they too can help in the fight against hate and indifference.

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