Grief in the Gravel: Standing Where Humanity Was Erased

 Auschwitz & Birkenau 😢 🏘️ 

There’s no easy way to write this. There was no easy way to be there.

Auschwitz and Birkenau are not just historical sites — they are mass graves disguised as silence. Standing where over a million people were murdered is not something you prepare for. It doesn’t feel like a “place.” It feels like grief itself. In the air. In the earth. In the walls.

🛑 ARBEIT MACHT FREI — “Work Sets You Free”

That phrase still haunts me.

You see it welded into the gate at the entrance to Auschwitz I, and again at Sachsenhausen before that. It’s a lie. A psychological weapon. A false promise meant to manipulate. The Nazis gave prisoners a sliver of hope just to crush it. Nobody was set free by work here. They were worked to death, starved, shot, gassed, or simply forgotten.

What kind of evil do you have to be to hang that over the gates of a death camp?

And it wasn’t just Auschwitz. This phrase greeted prisoners across multiple camps. It was propaganda as poison. Cruelty in cursive iron.

📍 Auschwitz I: The First Blow

Auschwitz I was where the system was built. Brick buildings. Barbed wire. Watchtowers. A place that looked “orderly” on the outside but was hell within. We saw:

      •     Block 11: the Death Block. The place for torture, execution, and starvation cells.

      •     The room where they tested Zyklon B gas for the first time.

      •     Displays of human hair. Eyeglasses. Prosthetic limbs. Children’s shoes. Prayer shawls. Suitcases still labeled with names.

I remember standing in a room full of shoes, breathing shallow. You don’t need words. You just feel it — this ache that travels down your spine. These weren’t just shoes. These were people. Mothers. Teachers. Artists. Babies.

📍 Birkenau: The Machine

Auschwitz-Birkenau is massive — the scale alone is numbing. You walk along the train tracks, imagining the cattle cars pulling in. Some didn’t even survive the ride. The ones who did were lined up — right or left. Life or death. Most never stood a chance.

We walked through the wooden barracks where people slept like sardines on wooden planks, freezing in winter, suffocating in summer. No plumbing. No privacy. No humanity.

I learned that 216,000 children were deported to Auschwitz. Many were twins or had disabilities — perfect targets for Josef Mengele’s twisted experiments. That shattered me. I thought about myself — Black, chronically ill, a woman. I would’ve had three strikes. I wouldn’t have survived.

Inside the museum, the names of victims are read aloud in alphabetical order. It goes on for hours. Days, probably. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking. Like giving voices back to the silenced.

🕯️ “The Fence Wasn’t Just Physical”

That quote kept echoing in my head. The electric barbed wire wasn’t just meant to trap people — it was meant to kill their hope. I read about people who couldn’t take it anymore and ran straight into the fence. That was their only “escape.”

And then there were those who were told they’d been “relocated,” only to be gassed hours later.

This wasn’t confusion. It was design.

❗ A Restaurant On Site?

I have to say this — why is there a restaurant at Auschwitz? The gift shop being off-site? Fine. But food? At a place where people starved to death?

It felt disrespectful. Like a slap in the face to the silence.

✍🏾 Reflections: If These Walls Could Talk, They Would Cry

I stood where people were killed for existing. Jews. Roma. Sinti. LGBTQ+. Black. Disabled. Political prisoners. Priests. Resistance fighters. Babies.

They died nameless, faceless to their murderers. But here, I saw their faces. I heard their names. I read their letters. I stood in their shadows.

And now, I carry their memory.

💬 “This trip didn’t just teach me about history — it taught me about humanity.”

It taught me that cruelty is built with bricks: one law, one slur, one silence at a time. That language matters. That memory matters. That we matter — and that we owe the dead more than flowers. We owe them truth.