GHOSTS OF AUSCHWITZ

As teenagers around the world prepare for group trips to Auschwitz this summer, I am preparing to break a promise. If ghosts exist, I’m not afraid of them. Not any more.

The Nazi crematoria of Auschwitz and Sobibor consumed members of my grandfather’s family.

At Jewish primary school, we sat on the scratchy carpet looking up at an old man who recited otherworldly stories of crowded railcars and forced tattooing and ovens in which his family burned.

At home, if a reference to the Nazi genocide flashed across the television screen, my parents protectively changed the channel. But, alone, I stumbled upon films I shouldn’t have seen in which a mass of undressed men trudged toward false shower rooms and German dogs mauled Jewish children as their mothers screamed.

A shelf in my parents’ dining room held books on Jewish history and heritage. Flung open, they revealed pages of terrifying black and white and sepia photographs. Naked women at the edges of open pits, desperately covering their genitals and breasts with their arms and hands. Skeletal figures, still alive, reaching through barbed wire fences. Open mass-graves.

During a weekend away with a Jewish youth group, we sat through a screening of Janusz Morgenstern’s “Ambulans,” an eerie 1961 short film depicting Nazi soldiers redirecting the exhaust fumes from a Red Cross van into the lungs of oblivious children. Shock and silent weeping filled the youth club basement.

Throughout my youth, I suffered from occasional nightmares in which German soldiers besieged my London suburban neighborhood and surrounded my school friends with brick walls and barbed wire. I stood outside, daring myself to enter.

A subconscious fear turned slowly over the years into an explicit promise: I would never visit Auschwitz.

I heard about the organized student-trips to Poland and I felt relieved that my school didn’t offer them. At university, new friends recounted their visits to “the camps.” Their experiences sounded worse than horror stories. “We sang Hebrew songs and we all cried together; you really need to go there,” some would say. They seemed to believe—clutching their travel photographs as proof—that they now understood something I didn’t. I felt guilty for staying at home and skeptical that my friends had experienced some kind of Holocaust-epiphany.

The idea of visiting the historical sites of Nazi atrocities terrified me. I imagined myself inside deteriorating gas chambers, the suffocating stench of disintegrating piles of human hair close by, the feeling of being taken over by profound horror or defeat. I didn’t want to stand where my people—or any people—or my family—choked to death. I didn’t want to be seen trying to make sense of what can never be understood, or to feel obliged to pray or sing, or to be judged if I couldn’t burst into tears along with everyone else.

I had become frightened of the ghosts of my grandfather’s family who would only recognize me as a disrespectful tourist, queuing for that critically acclaimed attraction, seeking that thrill-ride at Birkenau, the ultimate game of dare.

As a grown adult, determined to respond to my community’s history on my own terms, I plucked up the courage to visit Sachsenhausen in Germany.

It was a cold day. The grass was muddy. When the concentration camp was in operation—I remembered learning—there was no grass; the prisoners likely ate it all. We toured barracks and passed watchtowers and said nothing as we stared at the ruins of a small experimental gas chamber and crematorium.

Sachsenhausen seemed to me a quiet echo of our horrific past. I didn’t feel sad or shocked or angry. The Nazis killed thousands of people at Sachsenhausen over a period of nine years; people of Jewish or Roma or Sinti descent, homosexuals, political opponents of Nazism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, mostly killed through starvation, disease, exhaustion through hard labor, or intermittent beatings, torture, executions.

But Sachsenhausen represents something different from Chelmno with its gas vans and ovens belching out human ash, different from the Birkenau I’ve come to dread.

Yet, after Sachsenhausen, I felt pangs of relief. Its ghosts—if they had been watching me—had permitted me to walk over their tombs. They had allowed me to breathe the fresh air.

This week, I will fly to Kraków, Poland, with 11 other Holocaust scholars as participants of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program. After visiting Warsaw and Łódź, we will travel to Treblinka. We will spend a week in Oświęcim, touring the grounds of Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau, studying artifacts, and learning from the curators and education staff at the Auschwitz State Museum.

In general terms, I know what to expect at Auschwitz. I’ve studied the photographs and read the books and taken the online virtual tour. I have a good idea of what we will see and discuss. But I don’t know how I will respond in the moment or how I might be changed by this journey. Part of me fears being entirely overwhelmed. Part of me fears feeling nothing. Part of me expects, at nighttime, to slip back into the surreal Holocaust nightmares of my childhood.

If ghosts exist, I’m not afraid of them. Not any more. If anything, I’m afraid of myself. Yet, I am ready to break my promise.