This text was written by me and served as the introduction to my book of photographs "Among the Ashes" published in 2004:

I travel to central Europe to see some of the concentration camps my survivor friends have told me about. I bring a long a lot of film, some sturdy walking shoes, my husband Eddie, and a heart that is poised for breaking.

It’s hot. The pavement at Dachau radiates a thick, heavy, suffocating kind of heat. Along with the others, we pour out of the bus that carries us from Munich, guidebooks and maps in hand. We trudge to the entrance together. Several people have come prepared. They hold onto wads of Kleenex.

The barbed wire looks like stars stretched across the sky, rising just above the foliage.

The vegetation is dense and green. Paths lead to luscious spots of repose where markers describe the views: execution wall, blood ditch, buried ashes.

A prison uniform is displayed in the museum. I stare at the striped pants and imagine them draped over the chair of a beautiful woman’s bedroom. I see a man, disrobing, approaching the arms of his waiting lover, the bedsheets crisp and clean, the room dark except for the quiet light of early evening coming in through the window. I try to think of anything other than who might have actually worn this uniform, whose calloused feet may have slipped in and out of the wooden clogs before and after a long day of forced labor in this concentration camp.

I learn that from the beginning the Nazis had problems disposing of the victims’ bodies. Those that were thrown into mass graves often swelled so much during the summer months that they resurfaced and had to be buried again. That’s when the Nazis decided to build the crematoria. Dachau’s were unique because several corpses could be burned at the same time.

There’s a toddler with a pinwheel standing at the entrance to the crematorium. Every now and then she waves it in the air and the plastic colors start to spin around. Her mother takes her by the hand, and the two of them turn and stand in front of the oven, staring, lips moving slowly.

I wonder what they’re saying.

…..

I descend some cement steps at Mauthausen and enter the gas chamber. It takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. It looks as if the Germans have just cleared out. The place seems like it could be operational again with just a quick turn of a crank or the lowering of a heavy lever. Nobody is down here but me. I start to feel short of breath, like someone has just kicked me in the stomach.

After a while I start to hear the screams.

I remember reading that during the gassings, some of the victims would climb on top of others to get to the quickly disappearing fresh air above. When the doors were opened after the allotted twenty minutes, there were children on the bottom of the heap because so many adults had tried to scratch their way to the top. But there were also groups of dead families found huddles together, sometimes still holding hands.

Often the Nazis would tire of hearing the screams and would back their trucks up to the gas chamber, turn on the engines and sit. This way, they wouldn’t be bothered by the noise of people dying.

The sun is blinding. I shade my eyes and look around at each barrack and building, then enter a room that was used for hangings. The ceiling resembles a skylight. The sun pours in and washes the walls. I learn that prisoners were strung up on metal stirrups, one of which is still dangling lazily in the sun. I imagine the prisoners standing there, being forced to watch someone hanged for speaking out of turn, for not cleaning his boots, for sharing food, for looking pale. The sun would have been bright. They would have seen the victim’s head drop and his eyes roll back. They would have seen it clearly, as if he were lit by a spotlight on a stage.

Past the monuments and memorials I find the quarry and the “staircase of death.” Here prisoners were forced to carry granite stones weighing over one hundred pounds up 186 steps. This meant death for anyone who lost their footing. Sometimes the Nazis made a game out of it. They would place bets on who they thought would reach the top of the steps first. The one who did was then commanded to jump to his death from a stone cliff nearby. The guards also seemed to enjoy pushing laborers down the stairs.

I stand on a step midway down and try to imagine this. Of course, I cannot.

There is barbed wire everywhere.  The Nazis used to entertain themselves, I am told, by forcing prisoners to run full speed into the sharp fences, then shooting them as escapees. I imagine the guards in charge laughing and joking, shouting out congratulations to one another as they pick off the prisoners one by one, as if in a shooting gallery at a traveling carnival.

Even the commandant’s twelve-year-old son was allowed to shoot prisoners. He did this from his family’s front porch.

I think of my own son, Max. He’s twelve, too. He’s at summer camp learning to tie slipknots and eating homemade ice cream.

…..

Eddie puts on his yarmulke as we enter the parking lot at Auschwitz.

This place is considered the cemetery of the Jewish people. The largest mass murder ever committed in human history happened in this twenty-five-square-mile area. At least one and a half million people were murdered here, 90% of them Jews.

There is a hot dog and ice cream stand to the left of the parking lot. The lot itself is crammed full of buses. People are laughing and taking pictures of each other.

We could just as well be at Epcot or the Eiffel Tower. There are postcards for sale.

Just past the entrance gate there is an area where one of the six camp orchestras played music as the prisoners file by – either on their way to work or on their way to death. The Nazis forced the musicians to mask the noisy business of killing, creating what the prisoners called “The Devil’s Symphony.”

There are glass cases full of items that belonged to the murdered victims. They were discovered by the Soviets when the camp was liberated. There are eyeglasses, prayer shawls, suitcases, prosthetic limbs, two tons of hair, and thousands upon thousands of shoes.

The shoes get to me the most. The display is higher than I am tall and fills a room three times larger than my living room. Some of the shoes are flattened and crushed. Others look as if someone has just slipped out of them, like maybe they’ve been left at the front door because they’re too muddy and will leave tracks on the carpet.

The suitcases remind me of stories I’ve read about mothers who put their babies inside the luggage just before it was taken away – the hope being that some kind soul would discover the precious cargo and set the child free toward a safe haven, a bright future. It was a wild, desperate and final attempt at finding a way to escape the madness. Of course, babies were later found curled inside, suffocated and blue, their little bodies tossed aside and burned.

I wander into a shadowy cell underground. It is small and dank. The ceiling is low, with little headroom. Light pours in through a barred window and spills onto a small portion of one of the walls. This is a solitary confinement room. I’m told that a prisoner would be forced to stand in one of the corners. Bricks would be placed all around him, built up past his shoulders, so that he did not have even one inch to move. If he were tall, his head would be jammed against the ceiling. He would be made to stand like this for days.

The light on the wall is beautiful. There are so many subtle shades of gray, washed in delicate and wondrous patterns. It reminds me of a watercolor, muted and soothing, soft around the edges. Would the prisoner have watched this light and measured his days by it? As he began to lose consciousness, would the light have begun to turn to darkness, or would it have become brighter?

…..

The Nazis used to tell the prisoners upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau that the only way out of here was through the chimneys.

I spend three days wandering around the grounds. I feel numb. The air is filled with ghosts.

I learn that it only took half an hour for new arrivals to be undressed, gassed and then stripped of hair, gold fillings and jewelry before being taken to the crematoria. At the height of operation, as many as 12,000 bodies were burned each day.

The victims’ hair was used to stuff mattresses and woven into fabric for clothing.

Their ashes were plowed into the soil and dumped into ponds.

At the large “pond of human ashes,” I tiptoe silently along the edge trying to photograph it with great respect. At some point, though, I sink into the water. It’s a lot like a swamp and, as hard as I try, I can’t get back onto dry land. I go deeper and deeper into the pond. At first, I am filled with horror. My shoes are soaked. It feels disrespectful to be there among the ashes. The water is warm. I start to cry.

Then somehow, I begin to feel solidly connected to the people I’ve been trying to see all day. The people I’ve been trying to imagine. The people who are my ancestors. The people whose ashes now surround me.

In the water I stand and weep.

…..

It is late fall when I visit Majdanek. It’s cold and gray and the sky hangs low. Death shrouds this place like a heavy fog.

There are acres and acres of open land. This is where the prisoners were forced to stand for roll calls, exercises in dehumanization, torture and demoralization. Roll calls dragged on for hours, sometimes several times a day – in the cold, in the rain, in the snow, in the middle of the night, the stars splayed across the sky overhead, luminous and clear and so far away. I remember reading about one roll call during which guards forced the prisoners to stand motionless for thirteen hours. Those who flinched or dropped to their knees, exhausted from standing for so long or numbed by the frostbite that had begun to spread across their toes, were shot in the back of the head.

I wonder how many were able, in their last moments, to look up at the stars and whether they found comfort or mockery in that distant light.

It’s oddly discolored here. The sky looks muddy. I feel as if I’m weighed down by a heavy, wet blanket.

Here, as in every camp, hunger was a constant state for the prisoners. It tore at their insides and became their primary focus. Survivors tell stories of fights to the death over a single raw potato, an extra spoonful of watery soup, a few crumbs of stale bread.

I learn that one day, on a fall morning such as this, the prisoners were commanded to dig three large trenches. They were supposedly preparing for the “harvest festival.” At roll call a few days later, Jews were separated from the others, marched to the trenches and shot. Dance music belched from the loudspeakers, drowning out the screams and the machine gun fire. The killing went on until midnight, by which time 18,000 Jews had been slain.

I keep walking, though I find it difficult to move forward. I notice a few large black birds hovering overhead. Gradually, more and more start to appear. I approach a cement structure that is at the far end of the camp and realize that’s where the birds are circling, huge and dark and looming close. The structure turns out to be a memorial – a simply designed oversized urn containing a mound of human ashes. The ashes seem to stretch on forever. I see bones scattered in the heap. The birds are above me. I start to feel dizzy.

An inscription, rising high above the ashes, reaching up toward the soupy sky, reads: “Let our fate be a warning for you.”

There’s a doll here, crushed and broken. It belonged to a little girl who was killed on these grounds. I think of my daughter Abbie, and of the dolls she used to line up neatly on her bedroom shelf. She was four or five years old then, probably the same age as the child whose face surely twisted in despair when the doll was taken from her. I see the girl’s face. It merges with Abbie’s, and then, without warning, my imagination shuts down.

Everything suddenly seems very dark.

…..

The leaves at Stutthof snap under my shoes as I walk.

A survivor of this place tells me that corpses were burned in open pits because the crematoria couldn’t handle the large number of bodies. I stand in front of a clearing in the woods where huge mounds were built for burning – a layer of wood, a layer of bodies, another layer of wood, more bodies, and so on. Doused with benzene, they were set ablaze. I picture the sky, a sickening shade of orange and red and then a long, lingering black, the sour stench of death hanging in the air.

Some prisoners took their own lives, not only here, but at all the camps. One of the easiest methods was running into the electrified barbed wire fences. Most, though, died from beating, gassing, shooting, drowning, hanging, injections of phenol and other substances, starvation and disease. Roughly 7,820,000 (Jews and non-Jews) passed through the Nazi concentration and death camps between 1933 and 1945. No more than 700,000 survived.

…..

A psychopathic killer ran the concentration camp at Plaszow. He liked to shoot Jews from his balcony for sport.

Here, as in so many of the camps I’ve seen, nature has staged a successful battle to disguise the horrors that once occurred. In this beautiful place are ugly secrets. They are hidden in the soil. There is blood here; there are tears and sounds of wailing. There are reminders in the bone fragments and in the ash. There are children who never got to grow old, dreams that were never realized – a generation that was stripped of its dignity, its potential, its life.

As I roam around the place, I am overcome by its loveliness. It’s silent and lush and hilly, and there is a gentle wind caressing the long grasses in the meadows. I feel a sense of peace here.

I also feel a sense of hope.

I think about my friends who survived the Holocaust and the heroic manner in which they rebuilt their lives. I think about their children and grandchildren, of all the good lives that have come into the world because of them, of all the good deeds that have been done by them.

And I think of my family.

In a few months my son will become a Bar Mitzvah. My 81-year-old father will pass the Torah to me, and I will pass it on to Max. Another young Jewish man will take his place as a son of the commandments.

And so it goes, “l’dor va dor “– from generation to generation.

The breeze feels good on my face. I look at the land and consider the growth that is all around me. In silence and with reverence, I marvel at the resilience of this place and the resilience of the Jewish people.


The image above is the cover photograph:

Pond of Human Ashes (Rose), Auschwitz-Birkenau


The images below are:

Barbed Wire, Dachau
Guard's Tower, Birkenau
Oven in Crematorium, Dachau
Gas Chamber, Stutthof
Prisoner's Uniform, Dachau
Cloud and Barbed Wire, Stutthof
Doll, Majdanek
Front Gate, Auschwitz
Victims' Shoes, Auschwitz
Solitary Confinement Cell, Auschwitz
Pond of Human Ashes (Long View), Auschwitz-Birkenau
Execution Wall, Dachau
Regrowth, Plaszow