Aviva Goldberg

The weight of history pressed down upon me. Empty barracks and imposing watchtowers told stories of lives cut short in Auschwitz. I slowly stepped to the front of my group, preparing as best I could to lead evening prayers in such a place. No one else had volunteered to lead it. Perhaps they were smarter; they anticipated the emotional turmoil that naturally comes with chanting Hebrew prayers in a death camp. As the familiar melodies flowed from my lips, I was startled to discover Polish visitors crowding around us, phones in hand to record. Sensing the group’s sudden hesitancy, our tour guide leaned in, murmuring for us not to be alarmed by the curious Poles, many of whom had never seen a Jewish person before.

Earlier that week, our group visited Majdanek, another Nazi extermination camp. Walking in, I had expected the heartache of seeing the mass graves and crematoriums, but none of us could have expected what we saw just outside the camp’s barbed wire fence. Modern apartment buildings towered over remnants of an old gas chamber. People walked their dogs as they casually chatted near enough for us to clearly hear them within the camp. It was impossible not to notice the lively city of Lublin surrounding the eerily empty concentration camp. “How could someone live here,” my friend whispered in shock, “next to where thousands of people were murdered? It’s disturbing.” I agreed. The Polish visitors in Auschwitz filmed us praying because they had never witnessed living, Jewish people before. To them we were a novelty,  pieces of history they learned about in textbooks but never in person. The people living near Majdanek, meanwhile, were so accustomed to visitors inside the camp that they went about their daily routines without glancing twice at the mix of people walking through their extended backyard. The indifferent tenants contrasted sharply to the fascinated tourists in Auschwitz, making their attention all the more shocking. It was an odd feeling being at the center of the cameras in Auschwitz, but I could understand their desire to know more about a group they were unfamiliar with. I could not, however, understand why the Lublin residents chose to live beside a concentration camp. The reasoning certainly could not have been financial since the neighborhood appeared fairly well-off. They lived next door to a historically heinous site that people fly across oceans to see yet appeared uninterested. How can they take such a major part of their country’s history for granted?

In Birmingham, Alabama, my fifth-grade humanities teacher told my class never to take for granted the historical city that we live in. Growing up I saw signs all around of our city’s rich Civil Rights history. Much of my elementary education focused on the Civil Rights movement and Alabama’s history of slavery; in middle school, my class took a week-long trip across Alabama to visit sites and museums memorializing the horrific past of white supremacy, lynchings, and racist terror. 

Though it may not show when I casually walk with a friend through Kelly Ingram Park where police once attacked children with dogs and fire hoses, the weight of my city’s history presses down upon me. I am glad people visit Birmingham’s historic landmarks and photograph what shocks and surprises them, like the visitors in Auschwitz, but I am also glad not to be a tourist in my town. I understand, after all, that although some of the urbanites in Lublin appear to live as normal, the dark history that neighbors them is ingrained in them as it is in me.  My experiences in Poland and Birmingham have shown me how closely we all live alongside history, whether we acknowledge it or not. I’ve realized that although the past is not always easy to carry, it is a privilege and responsibility to understand how far we’ve come—and how far we still have to go.