But, my heart has been changing.
The summer after my first year of college I was blessed with the opportunity to go on a Holocaust Remembrance trip through Germany and Poland. As a huge history buff and dedicated reader of anything World War Two related, I excitedly boarded the plane wondering what I would experience for the next ten days.
It is weird writing about it now, after having had my own experiences abroad for four months. Before Belgium "The Holocaust Trip" was my big trip and before that was "Spain", will Belgium soon be overshadowed by my next life changing journey? Oh the possibilities! God spoils me so much.
As you can imagine, it was a very difficult trip. We stood in gas chambers, drew close to the two survivors we traveled with, heard stories, sang, cried, stood in shock at mass graves, walked victims "last walk" and saw the horrible things people could do to each other. I still think I haven't gotten over it. Actually, I know I haven't. I still find it impossible that humans were capable of doing that to other human beings. It literally blew my mind and I still haven't "coped" with everything I experienced.
The way people coped with what we saw on the trip varied depending on the person. Some became angry, some cried...a lot, some became speechless, some were shocked and others numbly went through the motions unable to deal with what we were experiencing.
I imagined that I would cry everywhere we went. I had done my research and I knew it was going to be amazingly depressing. However, I was surprised when I didn't cry at all. We would debrief each night as a group (I went with my school, another college and various community members) and I would sit there and listen to everyone else's testimony, filled with tears. I wondered if something was wrong with me. I was upset, I was heartbroken and I just felt numb. I was assured that yes, what I was experiencing was normal. Each person has their own reaction.
We visited Majdanek on one of our last days in Poland. It was creepy how real it felt to be there. There was the mound of human ash, the gas cans, the furnaces....
but for some reason they told stories about victims in the camp that seemed to resemble me. They described the story of one survivor who had a twin sister with blonde hair. The last thing he saw of her was her braid as she was being led away to the gas chambers. My hair was braided that day. It is no mystery how much I love my family, I love being a twin, I love having both older brothers and sisters to keep my head leveled. Every story they told at that camp just struck a cord that I was unable to feel up to that point in the trip.
Another thing that was cautioned throughout the trip was that we would be unable to comprehend the amount of death that occurred. We would see the collection of hair, personal items and shoes but it would be very difficult for us to grasp the magnitude of everything we saw. Every camp we went to had shoes that were collected from those imprisoned in the camp. Shoes shoes and more shoes....so many!
They told us to just pick one and make that our story. Just one shoe would make everything more real to us.
Secretly I thought that was silly, how in the world could I find one shoe, among the millions, that would become "mine". Throughout the trip a lot of people picked little kid shoes or ones that still had color. That was not for me (though I was happy for all of them that they found "their" shoe). But, of course, in Majdanek, things changed for me. I was looking at the shoes when all of a sudden I saw the biggest shoe I had seen the entire trip. It was literally HUGE. I stood there for a second then realized this wasn't just a shoe.
This was a person who probably put their shoes on that fateful morning wondering if today was the day they would be caught. The shoe was with the man when he ran through the streets frantically searching for a loved one or when he tied his shoe that day, realizing that his time was running out. That shoe was someone's. He saw it at a shop, tried it on, bought it and wore it on his first date with the woman he planned to marry. The shoe represented a sister who would never trip over them in the middle of the night (something I often did because my brothers had a difficult time of putting their shoes away!). The shoe represented a mother that would never again yell at her son to take his dirty shoes off before walking through the house. Yes it was just a shoe, but it meant so much more. And I cried.
My shoe, Majdanek, Poland.
Last year, as I had my own room as an RA, I would often have more people in my room than I was used to. At one point I had to take a picture of the variety of shoes that were outside my door (it gets way to snowy/slushy here). On Saturday I was walking into my room and I counted eight pairs of shoes scattered in front of my door. It made me so happy because I knew that each pair of those shoes had a story! Each pair of shoes belongs to one of my friends. Call me cheesy or sentimental, I am. But I am beginning to love shoes because that pair of shoes sitting outside my door brought that friend to me. The shoes are dirty and smell but they protected the feet that are now cozy on my rug. The shoes show me that my friend is HERE!
So excuse me if you see me staring at your shoes, wondering where they have been and what they have carried you through. They are welcome outside my door anytime :)
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