Today 27th January is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the media, as usual, commemorate the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated 6 million Jewish people, 200,000 Roma people, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
I think that the rhetoric that is usually adopted in commemorating this day, obscures partially what really happened in that period. It is really difficult to understand, at least till you have the opportunity to visit Auschwitz.
I live in Poland since over six years but just the last summer I have decided and planned to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp that is located in Oświęcim, 50km from Krakow.
Visiting Auschwitz should be definitely something everyone must do at least once in our own life. Because seeing all the shoes that where gathered by the people who arrived and died there, the grey hair and the amount of cups and glasses really make you realize the dimension of what happened.
When you arrive in the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) main entrance, the guide says that an estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, of whom at least 1.1 million died. And you start to think about those people in line after hours of traveling in a train and just waiting to die.
It is impossible to imagine living in the camp during the winter (where the temperature is constantly under zero), with no food, no warming clothes, nothing.
It is so hard to imagine that life, so impossible to realize how some people could survive, that words are simply not enough. You need to go there and see.
We assume that it will never happen again, but we forget easily. And it is happening now with Rohingya in Myanmar, it happened with Tutsi in Ruanda and with Bosniak in the Former Jugoslavia.
