Poland, 2011

"....My reveling in the posh and frosty Munich airport was soon squashed by landing in Krakow, at night and in the pitch-black darkness, where I had to wait outside on a street corner (alone yet) for a bus that was 40 minutes away from arriving. I realized I really didn’t know what bus I was even waiting for, so I splurged on my first expense and took a cab. My cab driver spent the entire 20 minute drive trying to teach me Polish, of which I remembered hardly 3 words, but he was warm and friendly and didn't feel threatening - one of the few things in Poland that didn't. My hostel was awful, freezing, damp and full of cigarette-smoking teenagers. The shower had no lock on the door and no shower curtain. So far, so good, right?

My first real day in Europe, I went to Auschwitz. The Auschwitz; the one sending harrowing chills up your spine just thinking about setting foot there, which it should. Auschwitz was the concentration camp dubbed to be the most horrendous of the entire Second World War. I've read about this place every year since second grade in school; I've seen movies, read nonfiction and fiction books about real people who were trapped, tortured and killed there. I've wondered forever HOW a place like this can even exist. Cruelty like that exists in my world? The world I love, that has treated me so well? It almost seemed like a sick joke when I was young. I always knew it was real and I believed the history. My bleeding heart suffocated for the people that spent so much as a day there. Something in me always yearned to pay some kind of tangible respect to the people who suffered in the Holocaust. Call it survivor's guilt or whatever you want; I wanted to know their pain. Who am I to have been lucky enough to escape that?

The bus to Auschwitz was 90 minutes long; the entire time, I held my breath, thinking that with every turn or over every hill I would be able to feel the horror and terror in the air. Maybe I would even see some kind of highway marker that would indicate that we were nearing one of the world's most threatening plots of land. No such feeling or marker ever came. We leisurely pulled into a small parking lot full of shuttle buses with Asians and Australians armed with giant camera's pouring out of them. From first glance, it looked like a touristy rural farm attraction. When I finally stepped out of the bus and into the crisp Polish morning air, I could finally feel it. I could feel my entire world of comfort, love, blessings and freedom all pouring out of me, in a place where all these liberties and every happy ideal was once drained from its inhabitants. It was a dichotomous moment; I was fulfilling one of my longest dreams, while at the same time I was exposing my livelihood to one of the most humiliating and terrifying realities of human history. It felt very wrong to be so entranced to be there. Anyone would readily assume that you have to feel awful and sick at the thought of walking through this place. I tried to contain my passion for the moment into knowing that I was there to show appreciation and remembrance for those that lost their lives, dignities, or loved ones to the hatred and evil of the new Third Reich, or any regime that initiated genocide for that matter.


I always find it a bit funny that when I go to historical places, everything looks exactly how I pictured in my mind that it would. Auschwitz was no different. I always wondered what it would feel like to walk underneath the entrance gate to Auschwitz with the infamous "Arbeit macht frei" sign staring daggers into its visitors from overhead. It felt exactly as I suspected it would; I felt like the luckiest girl in the world to be walking into this place not only voluntarily, but with the promise of walking out again with my life and dignity packed perfectly inside me, unscathed, a virtue which had been stolen from so many people during WWII. 

On our tour of Auschwitz I we mostly went in and out of barracks, looking at piles of hair shaved off Jewish women's heads, big enough to fill a 3 car garage. We gawked at photos of prisoners and heard about the recruitment of twins and the medical experiments conducted on these grounds. We toured basement torture chambers and painfully listened of the stories of completely blatant inhumanity. Finally we visited the only remaining gas chamber left standing at Auschwitz. I hadn't expected to be able to see, much less tour, a gas chamber. Once again I found myself confronting that which I had heard about my entire life as a student; a smoke stack rising out of a dusty cement building, hoses lining the ceiling of a large room where people were told they would be given a shower, and intricate rail systems used to funnel human corpses. I, Margaret Anne Elizabeth Dempsey, proud Catholic and freakishly blessed 24 year old from middle class America, stood and breathed the air in the room where millions of innocent people were murdered. Out of hatred. Actual genocide had happened there. To this day, that moment remains the most breathless of my entire life. 

I had 90 minutes to reflect and recover from Auschwitz as we rode back to Krakow, where I would immediately board a train to Hungary. You would assume one would feel sick, sad, angry, and heartbroken after such a day, yet more than anything, I felt lucky. I originally went to Auschwitz because, for as long as I could remember, the idea of such a place and such an event as genocide completely astounded me. It was as if it just weren't humanly possible for people to commit such flagrantly wrong deeds. I found that in reality, human beings built and ran Auschwitz and Nazi Germany. Growing up, I associated monsters under my bed with the likes of Nazi's; they sound particularly awful, they sometimes keep me up at night shivering, and I had to occasionally tell myself that they aren't real. They just couldn't be.  

I always knew I was very blessed to not have to worry about where my next meal would come from, but Auschwitz made me realize that I have much more to be thankful for: thankful for never having to watch my family slowly die of disease and torture around me, for instance. Thankful I was never gassed to death in a tiny stone room that, to this day, is suffocatingly claustrophobic and an unhappy room to stand in. 

Leaving Auschwitz also felt a bit odd, in that I felt a palpable level of guilt to be walking away from such a place. But being a visitor to a site like Auschwitz only proves that the Third Reich failed in their plan to rid the Earth of Jews and those whom they believe didn’t belong. In the end, good overcame evil. And the readings and learning's that I grew up with, those of Elie Wiesel and Anne Frank, continue to churn hope and love into a world that desperately needs it. If you've ever felt motivated to visit any concentration camp, I'd an avid supporter. It will shake you to your core. And it should."