A lot of people know that I am from mixed heritage, but many don't know what which nationalities specifically. In the American South, most people just understand my ethnicities as Black and White. I'm proud to say that I am Black mixed with Polish, White (great-grandmother raped by a White man), and Seminole Indian. This trip was intentioned with discovering more of my Polish-Jewish ancestry. My grandmother Jean, lived in Antipolia, Poland, as a young child but was moved away to America by her parents along with her other siblings. This was in the early 1940's, just before Hitler began his slaughter on Jews. Many of my great-cousins died in the Holocaust so I wanted to visit to reflect on this part of my history.
I was a little underwhelmed when I walked in to the exhibit of The Anne Frank house. It was nothing compared to the updated, interactive exhibit at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. It was then, in my criticism, that I realized that this exhibit was more about its location and history. It began to sink in, at that moment, that a tragic story of a great child occurred within the walls of this house. I got the chance to view all aspects of the home. As a poet, I noticed a aura of great sadness in the house. I heard more about Anne and her family's story of being forced from Frankfurt in to hiding in Amsterdam. How she came from a family of privilege and had to go in hiding in sub-par living conditions. It was touching to see the pictures of celebrities she pasted on the wall in her small sleeping area. I got to see the attic that she used to visit to get the stale house air out of her lungs. It's hard to imagine that the two families in hiding from the Nazis were rarely able to walk around or run water during the day in fear of being caught. They eventually were given up, as the story goes, and Anne was sent to Auschwitz, the most brutal concentration camp of all. A friend of hers that snuck to see her at Auschwitz said she was in bad condition because everyone fought for scraps of food, clothing, etc... Oftentimes, the teens and children would not be strong enough to survive. She said that Anne died just a few weeks before the U.S. helped to liberate the camps.
Two days later, I set out to Weimart, Germany, so that I could witness the Buchenwald Concentration Camp with my own eyes. This experience totally shook me. Indeed, there was no way that I could mentally or emotionally prepare myself for this visit to one of the largest concentration camps of all. I visited the de-lousing station, the crematory, operational rooms, furnaces, and other areas. I went down in to the dark basement where people were hanged from hooks and tortured. POWs were executed by shot to the neck. Bodies were thrown down a shoot and stacked in the area where I stood. These bodies were then sent to the furnaces. More humiliating, the remains were mixed together in one big pile and then randomly poured in to urns to be stacked or given to families. It was unsettling to picture that on those premises, families were destroyed, people were tortured, and lives were senselessly lost. The Nazi Germans were relentless on their systematic torture of not only Jews, but Russian POWS, "gypsies", homosexuals, and the handicapped; All of these groups were labeled as impure. The saddest part of it all is that only a few of the Nazis involved were actually brought to trial and sentenced to death. Many of the few that were tried had their cases lightened and were later released five to ten years later. Most of these devils moved away to other countries to hide from extradition. Many of them succeeded. Although brutal on the human soul, I suggest a visit to a concentration camp in Germany or Poland. They tell a unique story of human deprivation at its sickest. It tells the story of how people managed to survive such denigration, overcrowding, and death. It lives as a reminder of how low humanity can go if morality isn't respected.
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