Today, I remember the 6 million people whose lives were stolen from them solely because of their religion. A little over a year ago, I spent a week in Poland walking through the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Majdanek, visiting the mass graves of Glugow and Tarnow, and traveling around where the Warsaw and Krakow ghettos once stood.
After spending two hours on the bus watching the movie Escape From Sobibor, we found ourselves driving through the same forest depicted in the film we had finished watching minutes earlier. When we arrived at the location of where the Sobibor concentration camp once stood, we walked along a line of trees nicknamed the "Path to Heaven" by the Nazis.
At the end of the path, the line of trees opened up into a large field, and where there used to be a gas chamber now stood an enormous dome covering the mountain of human ashes that lied beneath. To this day I can not comprehend what I saw in that forest, nor do I believe I ever will.
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At each concentration camp we visited, we concluded our emotional visits by gathering in a circle and draping ourselves with Israeli flags as we all sang Israel's national anthem HaTikva; The hope. There was nowhere the entire week that I felt more empowered singing HaTikva than at Auschwitz. Through sorrow and tears, we all came together as one to sing the anthem of the same people that Hitler tried to rid the world of, and together we celebrated the hope that we may all one day live in peace with one another. The Nazis may have tried to rid the world of Jews, but today we stand taller and prouder than ever at how far we have come since the ending of the terrible nightmare called the Holocaust.
We must never forget, and we must never let it happen again.
May the memory of the 11 million people who perished in the Holocaust forever be a blessing.
