Birds don’t fly over the concentration camps and crematoriums at Auschwitz.
More than 600,000 people a year visit the former Nazi death camp near Oswiecim, Poland in a near constant pilgrimage known to travel agents as “grief tourism.” But fowl, apparently, keep their distance.
“Birds don’t fly over the camps,” reported David Herman, a Baltimore rabbi and city worker who went with his wife, Yetty, this summer to see the ruins for the first time. “There was still the smell of death in the barracks, and bone fragments keep coming out of the ash pits 60 years later.”
Yetty Herman lost most of her family at Auschwitz. Her husband, the rabbi of the grand Shaarei Tfiloh shul overlooking Druid Hill Park, is the son of a World War II veteran who helped liberate the Bergen-Belsen camp in Lower Saxony as part of a Canadian and British regiment.
The Hermans left Baltimore in early August, flying Air France from New York to Paris before connecting to Budapest. In Budapest they joined a chartered Jewish heritage bus tour for the trip from Budapest to Prague with stops at various synagogues and ancient cemeteries along the way. Finally, they took rooms in Krakow, about as far from Auschwitz as Baltimore is from Washington.
“The trip had a two-fold purpose,” said Herman. “To follow in the footsteps of our parents, whose stories were part of our upbringing.
And to show that the Nazis did not destroy us. That they are gone, but we are still here.”
You can easily plan for a visit to Auschwitz — there are many sites on the Internet helpful to Americans considering the trip — but you can’t quite prepare for it.
“I might do it again years from now with my grandchildren when they’re teenagers, but I’m not running to go back tomorrow,” said Herman, who spent about nine hours visiting four separate Nazi death camps in Eastern Europe, including Theresienstadt, Birkenau and Majdanek.
“I wore a [yarmulke] or a Kangol cap the whole time I was there and made sure to greet everyone who passed with the tradition Polish good morning of dzien dobry. Some responded nicely. Others just scowled and kept on walking.
“Since I’ve been home, I’ve had no less than three nightmares and I wasn’t even a prisoner. I shudder to think how the real prisoners [who survived] put up with the dreams so many years later.”
Rafael Alvarez can be reached at [email protected]
