A Promise Kept To Bear Witness

I am often asked if I went back to Auschwitz after liberation.  I just couldn’t go back to see the mountains of hair, the shoes, the eyeglasses, the baby pacifiers, and other items displayed there in the exhibits in some of the barracks.  I saw those items on the people going to the gas chambers.  It would be too painful; too many bad memories.  But it is very important for people, especially young people, to see it—to see the extraordinary conditions we lived in and how people were sadistically killed.

I had an experience recently that led to a sad realization.  I was an outpatient at the hospital and the nurse who was taking care of me noticed the tattooed number on my arm.  She looked at me and said sadly, “You don’t see too many people left with numbers on their arms.”  I realized that she was right. 

There are fewer and fewer of us eyewitnesses alive everyday.  That is why it is so important for me to share my story so people will know what really happened in the Holocaust and at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest graveyard of human ashes in the history of the world.