A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Scratch marks ran up and down the cold concrete, a living reminder of those who decades ago had driven their nails against the walls desperately trying to cling onto life. My dad and uncle knelt down in front of a small shrine encompassed by candles. In a strange way, seeing grown men cry is always humbling. While they were immersed in sadness, I could not help but feel guilty that I did not truly share in their grief. Perhaps I could not hope to; My father and uncle had grown up in war-ravaged Poland; they had witnessed first hand Germans hauling Jewish people away to death camps.
No amount of reading could allow me to relate to a tragedy that occurred forty years before I was born. Scanning the gas chamber at Aushwitz, I felt callas. Though I could acknowledge the horror of the event and the sadness that surrounded me, yet I did not feel it; it did not touch home.
The horrors of the Holocaust have been documented in countless w...