I Didn't Bring Her a Flower

"Picture from Auschwitz" -- William Browning

I didn't mean for my trip to be so forensic. I thought I would be moved, emotional, disturbed. But during the tour of Auschwitz, I found my mind rationalizing the horrific sights -- here was the gate which mocked the prisoners; there is the dungeon where hundreds were tortured. Stand here by this wall where they were executed and see this shoe from an infant who was lost in the gas chamber. Maybe the seven tons of women's hair captured by a Soviet train would stir me from my intellectual coma. Walking through the gas chamber, I felt the terrible claustrophobia and imagined the horror of dying in such a place, but it wasn't emotional. I walked through the barracks, witnessed the horrid living conditions, wondered how people could survive such conditions in the winter.

But I wasn't moved.

Intellectually, I knew about these things. I had studied the war and how the trains would efficiently move down this very track and how the newly arrived would be ushered into the gas chambers or into the labor camp.

I stood on the very same stones where a million had stood during their last moments on earth -- here is where they were separated from their families. They walked down this very path to their demise in an eerie calm.

Standing at the ruins of the gas chambers and the memorials, I felt nothing. I cursed myself for feeling so cold, so empty. How could I walk across these fields of ashes of so many without sadness in my heart? I walked back to the tracks and took a picture of a flower left by some nameless soul for the other countless and forever nameless souls.

Then I saw her.

I hadn't noticed her before; hadn't seen the photograph the first time I walked down this path. But now, I noticed it. A small black and white photograph taken when the camp was alive. There she was with her mother and her younger sister. They were standing right where I was. They were looking at the camera with a stunned look -- an unimaginable sadness. The caption simply explained, like so many other captions I had read that day, that these victims were walking their final steps to the gas chambers. But this was different. It was as if she was alive again and I was watching her hopelessly from the platform. I have seen this expression. I have seen this face.

This is the face my wife will use when she is uncertain. It is how my little niece looks when she is unsure if she has done something wrong; this face has become the face of what I love the most.

There she was in her last days, sadly holding hands with her sister -- but all I could see was how much she must have been loved, how her parents must have cherished her birth, how they must have had such hopes for her when they held her in their arms. This girl was meant to be a wife, a mother, someone's true love. She wasn't supposed to be here. She wasn't supposed to die here. How could it happen that I could tour the mechanisms of absolute horror and shrug them off, but this single photograph of this little girl, this sad little girl who I will never know, this little girl being brave for her little sister -- how could she suddenly shatter my intellectual arrogance and shred my heart to pieces? My heart answered, "She was real, she existed, she was loved, she was murdered, and she is gone." It was this realization that thundered down on me.

My tears began before I walked back to my driver. Now I can feel the immense suffering around me -- parents being pulled from children, husbands from wives, friends and family walking two different paths; complete oblivion. I want nothing more than to be away from this platform where the trains were ruthlessly unloaded. My tears join the millions of tears here as they rightly should, and I feel so guilty, so horribly guilty. In my heart, I feel such failure.

I didn't even bring her a flower.