Anonymous

I traveled across Poland to bear witness—to walk through the remnants of history where millions of Jews were murdered. I thought I knew what to expect, but nothing could prepare me for the weight of standing where they stood, where they suffered, where they perished.

In Kraków, we stepped into what was once the ghetto. People lived in the same buildings where families had been torn apart. They sipped coffee by windows overlooking streets paved with forgotten ghosts.

Birkenau swallowed us whole. The barracks stretched endlessly, skeletal remains of a place built for suffering. The silence was heavy—we held each other, hands gripping tightly, as if the weight of the past might pull us down.

Inside Auschwitz, millions of shoes broke us. Tiny, scuffed, worn by feet that never had a chance to grow. And then—the hair. Piles upon piles of it, lifeless, stripped of the heads that once held it proudly. 

The gas chamber was small, suffocating. Scratches covered the walls—last, desperate attempts at escape. A Star of David was carved into the stone, defiant even in the face of death.

At Majdanek, the past had not faded. It remained untouched, a time capsule of horror. The barracks smelled of decay, the beds barely wide enough for a child. And then, the ashes—an entire building filled with them, filled with the remains of my family. I sobbed, unconsolable, as I stood amidst death. The words of the survivor accompanying us echoed through the void of despair, “You give me hope” she said. 

We left, walking away from the places where others had only entered. And I wondered—how could the world have let this happen? And I wondered—how could the world have let this happen? Now, only 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, why does silence still remain the loudest response?

That day at Majdanek, standing before a mountain of ashes—ashes that once had names, faces, dreams—we made a vow. The horrors of the Holocaust would not fade into silence, buried beneath the weight of history. We became the witnesses. Their voices now echo through us, through the stories we will tell, the truths we will refuse to let die.