Worthy of Life

Worthy of Life

Bleak. That is the word that best describes the mood the weather pressed upon me as I exited the bus. The frigid air felt as though it blew right through my body, freezing each cell, turning my limbs to ice. The snow, which pelted my face, attached itself to the patches of white already on the ground, gradually expanding until it connected the whole world in hues of white and grey. Clumps of brown, dead grass peeked through the snow, a reminder of the death that had made this place famous. The tears that formed in my eyes solidified as they leaked down my frozen cheeks. Somehow I feel that if it had been a bright, sunshine-filled day, green grass below my feet and blue sky above me, the truth of this world I had found myself in would have been lost to me. The pain that emanated in this place, the pain that seemed so recent, though it happened decades ago, would have just slipped by me unnoticed had it not been an icy winter day. It would have been just another historical place, another fact in my mind placed there by various history teachers over the years. Instead, my emotional intuition had been activated and the place became more than the legend I had considered it before: real, but distant like a story. It was more than just words and statistics, but it was real, an undeniable atrocity, one of the grossest eras in all human history. Here I was in Poland. March, 2010. Auschwitz. Decades after World War II, the lives of the innocent, brutally subjected to Hell on earth, still cried out. Their plight became real to me in the most minimal sense, just by the effects the weather had on my flesh. The stage had been set, the mood achieved, and here I stood, bundled in layers of fabric, a luxury denied the victims of the Auschwitz camps. I walked through camp I, through the gate, past dozens of barracks, each of which held about a thousand people, cramped together, in beds that resembled cattle stalls. Yet these were people considered worth less than cattle. I walked through buildings that were storehouses the uncountable amount of belongings which prisoners had brought with them. Hair brushes. Shaving utensils. Bowls. Dolls. Shoes. Human hair. I had already been fighting sickness, but at the sight of the human hair, which was used to make blankets for soldiers, it was all I could do to stay on my feet. All the items were piled high, each a mountainous category, only a portion of total confiscated during the days of the camps. Among the numerous suitcases, I saw a name I recognized. Meyer. The knot in stomach became more tangled as I thought about how I had had family on both sides of the war. I had had family who had fought to support the man who had deemed these innocent people to be worth less than livestock, unworthy to live. These people who had lives like we do. Had jobs, families, struggles, talents. Felt happiness, sadness, fear, love, like we do. But they were thrown into the fiery furnace and they were consumed. Those deemed unfit for physical work were sent immediately to the gas chambers. Later, others prisoners would carry their corpses to the crematoriums which produced as, layering the ground in a constant snow, not composed of frozen water molecules. Others were shot in front of cement slabs. Others died in starvation cells. Others died from lack of nutrients or of the cold or of over work or of having lost the desire to live. What made them to be unworthy to live in the eyes of Nazi-Germany, I cannot understand. My anger at the evil the human race is capable of, my sadness of the beautiful lives destroyed, the hope that few found…all these combine in me to create a stoicism. I am overwhelmed with emotion, but which I cannot tell. All I can think of is my guilt at standing here, making a spectacle of the pain which engulfed millions. And yet in that pain, of the few that survived the camps, some had a joy that overcame all the darkness they had been through. If their joy can survive hell like that, the pain that I am engulfed in is also surmountable. I feel guilty when I think about how my own pain has consumed me, when I went through nothing compared to these people. How could anyone do something as gross as this to any living-being. How could any human being believe that another is so different from them that they are not worthy of even the most simple things? What is it that qualifies humans worthy or unworthy of life? In my anger I would say that those who had decided who was unworthy of life were the only ones worthy of the sentence to appointed to others. But thankfully, I am not the one who make the decision of who is worthy of life and who is worthy of living hell.