Poland’s Brzezinka Ruth Cohen refused to come here for over eight decades.
Here in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazis treated the captives like animals in cages surrounded by electrified barbed wire. Slave labor, human experimentation, malnutrition, and disease all contributed to the prisoners’ slow death. The majority were swiftly killed in gas chambers.
In May 1944, Cohen and her family were forcibly transported here by the Nazis in cattle trains just because they were Jewish. At the moment, she was fourteen years old. And when she got off the train, she didn t know it would be the last time she would see her mother, 12-year-old brother and two young cousins; they were likely sent to the gas chambers.
It’s terrible and horrible, and I didn’t believe the horrible way I was informed that they were dead. In an interview with NBC News, Cohen stated, “I believe it, of course, now.”
I was unaware of the death chambers. I was unaware of the crematorium. It aches significantly more now that I’m aware of it.
Eight decades later, Ruth Cohen felt compelled to return to Auschwitz in spite of the agony. She eventually did on Tuesday, but it was difficult.
First, Cohen walked through the notorious Arbeit Macht Frei gate of the Auschwitz I camp, where the sign cynically reads, “Work Sets You Free.” He was accompanied by a tour group from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Cohen felt awful a few minutes later, as if his heart were about to stop beating entirely.
But she continued.
She answered, “I have to do everything.”
She couldn’t bring herself to do some things, though. Cohen chose to go outdoors as the majority of her tour group went to view the mounds of victims’ hair. Later, she decided against walking through a gas chamber and crematorium.
I am unable to enter. I’d rather not enter. I don’t want to see the murder of my family and the entire globe. my entire universe.