With Bunny tucked tightly under my arm I hugged my parents, headed for the gate and boarded the flight to Poland with the 27 other students and teachers comprising my “Classrooms Without Borders” summer study trip. Would this trip to my tragedy-steeped ancestral homeland evoke deep-seated emotions I had suppressed long ago?
On my maiden voyage without my family, I would face whatever awaited me in Poland on my own, without the comforting embrace of my parents to insulate me.
Just me, myself, and I….and Bunny––my childhood keepsake.
A week later and a world away, I stood before a sign that read “Arbeit Macht Frei” or "Work Sets You Free" at the gates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
Auschwitz was grey, unreal and austere – more museum than mass grave. As we wandered in and out of the barracks, the tour guide repeated numbers and details.
There I stood in the ashes of my ancestors and the more he spoke, the more trivial the horrors seemed. The numbers he muttered started to become meaningless.
Countless displays filled with battered suitcases, torn prayer books and mangled eyeglasses were relics from the past, sealed behind glass. I ambled through the death camp as in a sleepwalker's movement— impervious and unmoved.
I was more horrified by my own detachment than by the artifacts of genocide in front of me.
Entering the final prisoner barracks, a lifeless heap of mutilated dolls lay before me. Some were missing limbs; some were without hair; some were headless. The vibrancy of their cheeks was replaced by the ashes of the children who once cherished them.
My surroundings faded away, and through the emotional fog I continued to hear the faint, unintelligible din of our tour guide. As our group exited the barracks, I lingered – transfixed by this macabre “children’s exhibit.”
As abruptly as I had entered this time warp, I emerged from it on a wave of convulsive tears.
Eight days later, on the bus to the Krakow airport for the trip home, I began to experience a gnawing anxiety– something was not right. I sat at the departure gate, forehead in palms, wracking my brain for the cause of this sudden apprehension.
Then it dawned on me. Bunny was gone. Inadvertently left behind at the hotel and along with it the smells, textures, memories and emotions of my own childhood. For the second time on the trip, I began to weep uncontrollably.
In light of Auschwitz, my distress over losing Bunny made me feel pathetic and infantile. In the luxury of my mourning, did I somehow forsake those cursed Auschwitz children who were rushed to their deaths with no such indulgence from their captors?
I am haunted and guilt ridden by the Auschwitz dolls.
They are, and will forever remain, a constant reminder of robbed lives, dreams unfulfilled and stories untold.
Bunny and the Auschwitz dolls are the talismans that keep me inextricably and uncannily linked through time and space to the Auschwitz children.
In the memory of Bunny, I see the lives of those Auschwitz children juxtaposed against my own, as I stand on the cusp of adulthood with one foot still in the comfort of an idyllic childhood that they never experienced and the other about to step into an adulthood that they never lived to see.
