I wrote this microfiction story after attending a conference and visiting a death camp in Auschwitz. This 50-word short story and accompanying backstory are, in part, my attempt to reckon with what I saw and experienced.
Auschwitz, Seventy Years Later
Rachel’s group toured barracks, gas chambers, ovens.
She had come to remember great-uncle Shevah, who lost a leg in WWI and died here in WWII.
“The SS took everything useful,” her guide explained in the prosthetic room. “If unfit, they were killed right away.”
Rachel wept, praying he hadn’t suffered.
Thank you for reading my story. The pictures are my own, taken on November 10th, 2018 when I was in Poland, and went with a group to tour Auschwitz.
It was a profound experience, and one I didn’t feel I could write about in a regular blog post. I needed to separate this somehow, and I chose fiction as the vehicle for sharing at least a little of what that experience was like, and what it meant.
But now that I have gotten started, I find that I have more to say.
It is a lot to take in — that people treated other human beings like lesser creatures in the Holocaust. Less worthy of food, warmth, decency, life. That they lied to them, told them they would be sent to camps to work instead of to their death. That many Jews were transported and retained in horrible conditions which many could not survive. That the SS sent thousands of them into gas chambers, telling the Jews that they were going to clean, hot showers. That they killed them at first in small numbers, and then developed more and more efficient ways to kill the massive numbers of Jews that were rounded up from their homes throughout Poland and sent by train to camps like Auschwitz and neighboring Birkenau (Auschwitz II).
My father fought in Germany in the war, and some of the stories he told me will stick with me for the rest of my life. Other than that, I have no unique perspective on any of this, and no personal history to share. My ancestors did not spend time in Nazi death camps. But millions did, And an estimated 1.1 million Jews died in the Auschwitz camps alone.
According to Wikipedia:
No one knows exactly how many people were sent to Auschwitz, or how many died there. However, historians estimate that between 1940 and 1945, the Nazis sent at least 1.3 million people to Auschwitz.[4] About 1.1 million of these people died or were killed at Auschwitz.[4]
They don’t know the actual count because many people were erased. They were gassed, then burned. Our guide at Auschwitz told us several of the ways ashes were dealt with, but I can’t remember them. There was more information than I could take in. I do remember that she said the grounds of Auschwitz are covered with ashes.
Let’s talk about the numbers. I can’t even visualize one million. Can you? Think about this.
Here’s a picture of one thousand dots:
One million is one thousand thousands: 1,000 x 1,000. If we copied this picture of 1,000 dots and put it in one long scrolling list on a page, maybe we would begin to get an idea.
But to imagine each dot as a person, with hopes, dreams, and unique abilities — babies, gifted musicians, barbers, butchers, mothers, fathers, seamstresses, shop owners, young men and women hoping to get married and build a life — is even more mind numbing. And devastatingly sad. There really is no way to sum up or simplify one’s feelings about the holocaust, and I won’t try.
Personal stories give perspective, I think. That’s what I tried to do in this 50-word story. I wanted to consider one life, and the outcome that may have occurred due to that person’s state of being.
The character in the story (Rachel) visits Auschwitz in the modern day to honor the memory of her great-uncle. All she knows is that he died there. But when the guide (like our group’s guide) describes the process of selection, and that those who were seen as unfit to work were sent immediately to the gas chamber, she believes that a piece of lost history falls into place. Because she knows that one detail about his prosthetic, she believes that she may be able to guess what happened to him. And she prays that means he did not suffer, as those did who lived through cold winters with almost no food or clothing in unheated buildings.
A Real Auschwitz Story
One of the incredible things that happened on the trip to Auschwitz is that I spent time chatting with @techslut and @mrlightning who are down-to-earth, smart, funny and wonderful to talk to. @mrlightning has an amazing story of his grandfather who lived in Auschwitz. He survived and went on to live his life and to marry again (his first wife and his child did not survive Auschwitz). @techslut was able to do some research and wrote about it. You can read it here.
I hope this helps me to end this on a somewhat lighter note. Thank you for reading.