PPMC TRAVELOGUE WINTER BREAK 2015 WINNER ARTICLE :
Arbeit Macht Frei’ – Work Will Set You Free by D
Dear reader,
Welcome to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. By the time my tale reaches you, I will already be dead. My body will finally be at peace on this bloody earth, but I pray that my story knows no rest, that it haunts generation after generation of those who come after me. I pray that the future learns from this tragedy, for if humanity were ever to lower itself to repeat what has been done, then dear reader, all hope for a better world may near be lost.
I have been a prisoner of this camp for 3 months now. 3 months of working myself to the bone for 16 hours a day, 3 months living on meagre scrapings of food, 3 months of embracing the cold temperatures that winter brings. I am dying, dear reader. I knew it from the moment I set foot in this camp. Perhaps it was the pain of being separated from my family. Perhaps it was the squalid conditions they kept us in, where disease and filth ran rampant. And perhaps it was the humiliation of being stripped of my identity, and forced to conform to a row of numbers tattooed on my arm. The camp has broken me inside.
Dear reader, there are many ways to die here. Often it was a single gunshot to the back of the head. More than one prisoner who found death more appealing than this hell hole threw themselves on the electrified fence and fried to death. But my life ended the way hundreds of thousands of others did, poisoned slowly and painfully in a gas chamber.They forced me to trudge to my execution. In my sick and weakened state, the walk seemed tortuous. I was then stripped of my clothes, and made to enter a large room with thousands of others, naked and freezing and hopeless. The doors slammed shut. Minutes later came the pitter patter of pellets being poured into our chamber from holes on the roof. A choking smell filled the room, and I closed my eyes amidst the screaming and the crying and the pleading. It became harder and harder to breathe, and just like that, it was all over.
Dear reader, you mustn’t blame me for being so unfeeling in my death. I had suffered long and hard, and my body yearned for rest. But there was no rest to be had in this camp, and even after I was dead the atrocity did not end. My hair was shaved away from my head and sent to make cloth for the army uniforms. They inspected my teeth for gold-fillings, and if I had any they would’ve pried them out my lifeless gums. Afterwards they burnt my body in a giant furnace, and dumped my ashes unceremoniously in a muddy pond beside the crematorium.
Dear reader, where you are standing now is the only graveyard ever offered to me, the ruins of the buildings around you are my tombstones. Weep not for what has happened, how millions of innocent lives were massacred because one individual believed themselves to be above the other. Instead, weep for humanity now, who has learnt almost nothing from what happened to me and my people 70 years ago.
D went to Poland last winter and learnt a lot on how far can humans be inhumane to another. Let's not let the history repeat itself. A moment of silence for the Auschwitz holocaust victims.
