Auschwitz- Birkenau.

Gate to Auschwitz.
Blocks.
Barbed wire, sign- basically, if you don't stop, we will shoot.
A rose below a set of gallows.
Birkenau.
Birkenau.
Men's barracks.
What is left of the crematorium.

This wasn't an easy day. It wasn't a fun tourist exhibit. I realized I have everything that I could ask for and that I complain way too much.

It was early morning, and we set out on a bus to Auschwitz. The tour began with a short video giving us a brief history of the Holocaust. From here we met our tour guide and started walking through each block, many remade into exhibits. We walked in silence through each one, trying to wrap our minds around the evil that happened on the ground we were walking on, only 65 years ago. We saw the first crematorium, torture cells, the commanders house, the gallows where he was hung after liberation of the camp. We saw the death wall where hundreds of Jews were executed, we walked the ground they walked on; the ground they died on. We saw piles of thousands of shoes, luggage, glasses, pots and pans, and mounds of human hair. We saw what was stripped, taken and stolen from the victims of this genocide.

It wasn't easy to walk through everything. Everything I had read about or been taught in school seemed all too real. The evidence was sitting there, reality was smacking you in the face.

From Auschwitz, we took a bus over to Birkenau, the main cemetery of the Holocaust. It was a vast expanse of barrack next to barrack, closed in by rows of barbed wire. The train tracks where millions of Jews and others were driven in to be exterminated stood in the middle of everything. We saw what was left of the men and woman's barracks, the guard's watch towers and a replica of a cattle car. We walked along the tracks, back into the woods where the remnants of the gas chambers and crematoriums stood.

To be honest, I was the coldest I have ever been in my life. Everything was so open, the snow was falling and the wind was bitter cold. But we couldn't have been here on a better day. While we were bundled up and cold, it made the fact that people were given pajamas and clogs and forced to work outside in worse conditions than we were in. It made it seem so real, yet so unimaginable. The whole experience was eye-opening, a reminder of what should never happen again...