Remembrance
Here I stand in the midst of Auschwitz
My mind racing with memories.
Silent people walk
Where living skeletons worked.
There is a silence,
But I hear the cries of my people.
A slight breeze passes,
But I feel the beating of a whip.
My hands sift through what seems like ashes
And I glimpse a sea of bodies aflame.
There is an open field,
But I see innocent people beaten.
A lone building stands in the distance,
But I see a place of death.
A place where terrible things took place
Horrors not even known to man.
With wistful eyes, I observe this place
Seeing things of the past
This place being as I left it
With an echo of remembrance.
~ Tawnysha Lynch
As I stood in the crisp morning of an autumn’s day clutching my mother’s favorite blooms, pink roses, I still felt the pain of yesteryear. The date was the 27th of January, Holocaust Memorial Day, and I had travelled thousands of miles to Auschwitz, a Birkenau Memorial site near Warsaw, Poland in remembrance of my parents and my fellow Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
I have made this pilgrimage for several years now, it is still never quite well-rehearsed, tears from my eyes always drops down, for the painful memories of the concentration camp came flooding in once again. Thousands of strange faces, yet who were my Jewish brothers and sisters, strained because of hunger, torture and hard labour. Their lifeless eyes sunk back into the sockets and their bodies so emaciated that they were all bones wrapped up in a thin layer of grayish, bloodless skin. They were all walking corpses, my parents and me included.
We had come here full of hope just like the rest of them. The SS stands for Schutzstaffel, the bodyguards of the Nazis, who were responsible for the atrocities in the Holocaust. They had promised to relocate us to another place where bountiful jobs could be had. So like lamb to the slaughter, my parents and I were bundled onto a train bound for Warsaw. We suspected nothing but as soon as we got to our destination, men, women and children were hastily segregated. I remember that that was the exact moment when immense fear entered my heart and I began to sense something amiss. I still saw my parents at least, albeit from a distance. They worked on the field moving heavy boulders. Then our numbers dwindled and the odd thing I noticed was, they never came out from the shower building where delousing took place regularly. The smoke from the chimney nearby billowed curiously and endlessly. It did not take too long for the rest of us to put two and two together. From that day forward, I prayed hard against a fate that was surely doomed.
And doom came not a day later. From the barbed fence, I witnessed several rows of Jewish men and women being ushered into the shower building, all the time the menacing SS soldiers were butting them with the rear pact of their guns. If the earth could weep then, it would have wept rivers of blood. I could not tell you exactly how I felt for I was numb with terror and crushing pain. When my eyes fell on the shadowy figures of my parents, I stopped feeling like a human altogether. My heart stopped bumping, my blood froze in my veins and arteries, and my breath seized. They did not see me. I was only nine years old then. But I saw everything. All that was required to make me die a thousand deaths since then.
Of course, Father and Mother disappeared into that building, the labyrinth of six million deaths. That is why today, I am here to honor them and my fellow Jews, for their indomitable spirits which live on in me.
Today as the world acknowledges this dark chapter of humanity, may we all remember what is worth fighting for. Sadly, discrimination on the basis of race or religion still exists in this modern age. An extreme example of this is the ethnic cleansing which took place in the former Yugoslavia. In the aftermath of its breakup, sweeping and violent efforts were initiated to create pure ethnic territories. Croatia wanted to rid its land of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies while Bosnia desired to forcibly remove Muslims from its territory. During the Bosnian War which stretched from 1992-1995, over 200,000 Muslims were massacred by the Bosnian Serbs led by the power-hungry Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic. The world has since deemed this crime against humanity as "the greatest failure of the West since the 1930s."
Therefore, let us not allow our differences to divide us, but fight to preserve our uniqueness as individuals and citizens of great sovereign nations around the world. In essence, beyond these superficial dissimilarities flows the blood that runs through and sustains human life. It is still red. Universally.
Here I stand in the midst of Auschwitz
My mind racing with memories.
Silent people walk
Where living skeletons worked.
There is a silence,
But I hear the cries of my people.
A slight breeze passes,
But I feel the beating of a whip.
My hands sift through what seems like ashes
And I glimpse a sea of bodies aflame.
There is an open field,
But I see innocent people beaten.
A lone building stands in the distance,
But I see a place of death.
A place where terrible things took place
Horrors not even known to man.
With wistful eyes, I observe this place
Seeing things of the past
This place being as I left it
With an echo of remembrance.
~ Tawnysha Lynch
As I stood in the crisp morning of an autumn’s day clutching my mother’s favorite blooms, pink roses, I still felt the pain of yesteryear. The date was the 27th of January, Holocaust Memorial Day, and I had travelled thousands of miles to Auschwitz, a Birkenau Memorial site near Warsaw, Poland in remembrance of my parents and my fellow Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
I have made this pilgrimage for several years now, it is still never quite well-rehearsed, tears from my eyes always drops down, for the painful memories of the concentration camp came flooding in once again. Thousands of strange faces, yet who were my Jewish brothers and sisters, strained because of hunger, torture and hard labour. Their lifeless eyes sunk back into the sockets and their bodies so emaciated that they were all bones wrapped up in a thin layer of grayish, bloodless skin. They were all walking corpses, my parents and me included.
We had come here full of hope just like the rest of them. The SS stands for Schutzstaffel, the bodyguards of the Nazis, who were responsible for the atrocities in the Holocaust. They had promised to relocate us to another place where bountiful jobs could be had. So like lamb to the slaughter, my parents and I were bundled onto a train bound for Warsaw. We suspected nothing but as soon as we got to our destination, men, women and children were hastily segregated. I remember that that was the exact moment when immense fear entered my heart and I began to sense something amiss. I still saw my parents at least, albeit from a distance. They worked on the field moving heavy boulders. Then our numbers dwindled and the odd thing I noticed was, they never came out from the shower building where delousing took place regularly. The smoke from the chimney nearby billowed curiously and endlessly. It did not take too long for the rest of us to put two and two together. From that day forward, I prayed hard against a fate that was surely doomed.
And doom came not a day later. From the barbed fence, I witnessed several rows of Jewish men and women being ushered into the shower building, all the time the menacing SS soldiers were butting them with the rear pact of their guns. If the earth could weep then, it would have wept rivers of blood. I could not tell you exactly how I felt for I was numb with terror and crushing pain. When my eyes fell on the shadowy figures of my parents, I stopped feeling like a human altogether. My heart stopped bumping, my blood froze in my veins and arteries, and my breath seized. They did not see me. I was only nine years old then. But I saw everything. All that was required to make me die a thousand deaths since then.
Of course, Father and Mother disappeared into that building, the labyrinth of six million deaths. That is why today, I am here to honor them and my fellow Jews, for their indomitable spirits which live on in me.
Today as the world acknowledges this dark chapter of humanity, may we all remember what is worth fighting for. Sadly, discrimination on the basis of race or religion still exists in this modern age. An extreme example of this is the ethnic cleansing which took place in the former Yugoslavia. In the aftermath of its breakup, sweeping and violent efforts were initiated to create pure ethnic territories. Croatia wanted to rid its land of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies while Bosnia desired to forcibly remove Muslims from its territory. During the Bosnian War which stretched from 1992-1995, over 200,000 Muslims were massacred by the Bosnian Serbs led by the power-hungry Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic. The world has since deemed this crime against humanity as "the greatest failure of the West since the 1930s."
Therefore, let us not allow our differences to divide us, but fight to preserve our uniqueness as individuals and citizens of great sovereign nations around the world. In essence, beyond these superficial dissimilarities flows the blood that runs through and sustains human life. It is still red. Universally.
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