Elie Wiesel said, “To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice.”

There are certain moments in life that leave a person permanently and profoundly altered, my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau was undoubtedly one them.

It was on a cold and dreary day of April that I beheld one of man’s greatest tragedies. A grey and comfortless sky, beset with crows lurking above, framed the entrance to the camp. The rain pattered dismally against the rugged terrain as I entered into the camp under the sign, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work sets you free)—the gate which would later become known as “the gate of death.” I felt a palpable distress, an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, as I continued my walk, weighed down by a mind convinced this could not be real. I have read several books and watched countless films about the Holocaust, but visiting the largest of the German Nazi concentration camps, where 1.1 million men, women, and children lost their lives, was easily one of the most poignant experiences I have had to date. I spent almost the entire time just trying to understand how something so unspeakably evil could even occur.

As a whole, my visit was extremely sobering. Mere words will never suffice. It is inconceivable to me that the human heart can harbor such hatred. Neither the most vivid imagination nor the deepest empathy can enable one to experience even remotely the horror endured by the victims of the Holocaust. Auschwitz, however, brought this horror to life. An unfathomable and unforgettable event that stunned, frightened, and overwhelmed the world, the Holocaust will always remain a hauntingly painful episode in human history and, though my visitation to Auschwitz helped put these ghastly events into perspective, no person will ever be fully capable of understanding such monstrous evil. It left me numb, my mind consumed with unending questions, and my heart broken. I trembled, sick with fear, aching for answers. How could any human be so wretched?

One of the saddest and most painful sights at Auschwitz is the display of shoes in a massive glass case that takes up approximately half of a barracks room in Block 5. The shoes are deteriorating and are largely gray and black. A few shoes, however, are made of red leather and stand out. The juxtaposition alone is enough to make one fall to their knees. To think each shoe represents a life—a life taken too soon, a life deprived of dignity.  

If there’s one major takeaway it is this: the Shoah has made us painfully aware of what man is capable of.

I will conclude with a deeply insightful quote from Harold S. Kushner. He writes, “Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”