post before Auschwitz

The trek is running to an apex. You could say it began at childhood, even before that. Tempting the imagination of confronting autrocities I saw in documentaries, read in storyb ooks. There were bodies and it led to questions and then to family stories. And then it was that it happened to them and it happened to me.
There were trips back to the homeland and the search. Places took on meaning, survivors told stories. And then there were the camps ,the places between the big cities of large Jewish populations: Dachau, Malthausen, and Terizienstadt. An exposure but not the horror.
So this is the trip where the feelings mount. From the cities where vast populations of Jews collected and dwelled for centuries, to the regime that sought to destroy European Jewery and to the death camps dehumaized and disregarded human life.
Treblinka is a place leveled by Nazi;s to disguise the murder of nearly a million people. Majdenek is a place of reproductiion, something the Polish want to presere from the remains left by their German occupiers.

At Majdanek we met Thomas Tovia Blatt the little boy in the movie Escape from Sobibor. Now an older man, he visits the memorial often, though lives in the US.