Photograph by William Whitaker

© 2007 - G.G. Vandagriff
All rights reserved.

Fifteen hundred persons had been traveling by train for several days and nights:  there were 80 people in each coach.  All had to lie on top of their luggage, the few remnants of their personal possessions.  The carriages were so full that the only top parts of the windows were free to let in the gray of dawn.  Everyone expected the train to head for some munitions factory, in which we would be employed a s forced labor.  We did not know whether  we were still in Silesia or already in Poland.  The engine's whistle had an uncanny7 sound, like a cry for help sent out in commiseration for the unhappy load which is destined to lead into perdition.  Then the train shunted,  obviously nearing a main station.  Suddenly a cry broke from the ranks of anxious passengers, "There is a sign, Auschwitz!"  Everyone's heart missed a beat at that moment.   Auschwitz - the very name stood for all that was horrible: gas chambers, crematoriums, massacres.  Slowly, almost hesitatingly, the train moved on as if it wanted to spare it's passengers the dreadful realization as long as possible: Auschwitz!
 
As a dewy-eyed twenty-year old who had not yet plumbed life’s tragedies, I climbed on the bus headed for a place that everyone talked about in undertones—I had never heard of it.  I had never even heard of the holocaust.
It is impossible for anyone who hasn’t been there to understand the reality of Auschwitz.  It was a gray day when we went and stood in the gas chambers.  Being of an excessively sensitive disposition, I tried to put myself in the place of someone who had just entered the “community shower”—old people, women, and children.  What were their feelings when the gas was turned on?  Is death from cyanide gas quick?  Or is it agonizing?  And then there were the ovens for burning the bodies.  They were shaped like troughs.  A body at a time was placed in the trough and then smashed into the oven.  The ashes escaped into the air and are still there, in the crevices between the bricks.  I was walking on human remains, human despair, human suffering of the acutest kind.  It was holy ground.

Then there was the museum—seven tons of human hair shaved from dead Jewesses before they were burned, gold wrenched from teeth of the victims.  I can’t really remember more, it was all horrible.  I still see in nightmares that vast glass case with all the hair.  What were the Nazi’s planning on doing with it?

Then we visited the barracks—wooden racks like bunkbeds without mattresses.  Except that each bunk held eight men.  Men who worked all day a back-breaking work, just to punish them for being Jewish.  They were fed only enough for minimum survival needs, so the bunks could easily hold eight.

Can you imagine the effect of this on a 20 year old girl who had never even known such a horror existed?  I was catatonic with anguish.  When we returned to our hotel, I took to my bed for four days.  No one knew but I burned with fever as the continual nightmare of what I had witnessed was filled out with imaginings of the reality, the accumulation of human suffering that had taken place on that holy ground.  My temperature was 104.  I was delirious with agony.  How could anything this terrible have happened.  How could human beings ever justify to themselves such behavior.  I am half German, and this caused me tremendous guilt.  The reason I had never heard of Auschwitz is because my father was an anti-Semite who believed there were good reasons for the Germans to exterminate the Jews.

This is a time in history I will never come to grips with.  I wrote The Last Waltz in an attempt to understand how fascism could grab hold of a nation.  I hope its lessons will stay in the hearts of many.

Now, I know, because the Lord has told me, that death is not the ultimate tragedy.  Hate and murder kill the spirit.  But martyrdom such as those Jews suffered transports them to Paradise.  It also won them a state of their own, paid for with their burning bodies.