What's the point?

I thought we were done with the bad stuff after Treblinka but I guess I hadn't looked at the itinerary closely enough. On our last day we took a day trip to Lodz (pronounced Woodj), the third largest city in Poland, a couple hours from Warsaw (but as we learned on our way back, many more hours if there is a major accident on the highway). There we visited the train station from which the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto were shipped off the death camps. There was yet another memorial, and more photos of Jews in the midst of their daily lives who would all by dead within a year of the photographs being taken. And horribly, sitting on the train tracks, there were replicas of the cattle cars that took them to their deaths, and you could go inside them.

Early on in the trip my mind struggled to make meaning of the things I was seeing. Even if I couldn't make sense of what had happened, I wanted to take something away from the experience, to learn something that I could take back and contribute to the world. By the end I had given up. I just surrendered and cried and then tried to get the hell out of there as fast as I could. There was no meaning, no sense to be made, nothing to take away but pain. I wondered why I had come and had no answer. Many people respond to these things by becoming angry and hateful, by feeling like victims or building walls to avoid ever becoming victims again. None of these responses were acceptable to me. I needed to keep an open heart. But in keeping it open it felt like it would be crushed. If the response to this is to become angry and bitter, maybe it's better to forget. If the response to this is to be crushed, what good does it do? I know there is a reason I am here, and it may come to me eventually, but right now I can't find it. Now I just want to leave and never come back and never think about the holocaust again. Now I understand why so many survivors never talk about it.

After writing what I wrote above, I talked with Olivier, who had been writing similar things on his own blog. Early in the trip, we were all jumping to answers and actions too easily. Maybe now, in the face of some of the worst things human beings are capable of, it's better to be in a place of not knowing and not having any answers.