Yom Kippur 2024

I haven’t observed Yom Kippur in a number of years, but today I happen to be in Krakow and chose to observe it by going to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The main Auschwitz museum is hauntingly well preserved, almost looking like a movie set. Many of the facts I knew growing up Jewish and learning about the Holocaust, but standing there, in the actual spot, it hit a little different.

But then there was Bunker 11.

Bunker 11 was where the Nazis first tested gassing prisoners. The museum up to that point was similar to other Holocaust museums I had been to, but that, that was different, and just the beginning.

The next stop was in the only surviving actual gas chamber and crematorium on site. We walked through it. I saw the vents they dropped the gas from. They described why it was so effective.

I’ve ways had a picture of what these were like in my mind, but it was so much more brutal through it’s… banality? than I imagined. A grey concrete bunker, connected to a room with furnaces, burning so hot they needed steel carts to load the bodies. A true nightmare.

Then we went to Birkenau.

If you don’t know the name, Birkenau is where the trains dropped everyone off. We stood next to the house, pictured in era pictures from the main museum, where new arrivals were sorted either to bunkers or directly to the gas chambers. We saw the remains of a crematorium the Nazis destroyed to attempt to cover up their crimes in the final days of the war. The number of those killed there, 90% Jewish, their ashes scattered on the grounds, make it all a giant cemetery.

But the biggest things I got from actually being at Birkenau were one, it’s size. It was 2km by 1km of fairly tightly packed bunkers. Multiple gas chambers and crematoriums. And two, a glimpse of the living conditions for those kept there.

They have preserved bunkers that we went into. Close, cramped, dark, with not enough airflow to stay cool in the summer or heat for the winter. Clearly designed with the intention that those living there would not survive.

It’s a true miracle that anyone survived this, and a true horror that humans are capable of this much evil.

Today, as I was there, as I saw intake pictures and bunks and gas chambers and remains and literal tonnes of hair shaved from those killed, I remember not only my loved ones lost, but them, too.

May their memory be a blessing.

Reflecting back on my day today, the most ominous sign I think they have at the museum may have been the no open flames sign in the former gas chamber and crematorium.

Everything else in the museum filled me with sadness, maybe even dread, but that modern sign in that place actually made my skin crawl with fear.