The Choice

eight or ten. e immensity crushes. I sense it in our stillness, in the
way we almost stop breathing. ere is no fathoming the enormity of
the horror committed in this place. I was here while the ĕres burned, I
woke and worked and slept to the stench of burning corpses, and even
I can’t fathom it. e brain tries to contain the numbers, tries to take
in the confounding accumulation of things that have been assembled
and put on display for the visitors—the suitcases wrested from the
soon to be dead, the bowls and plates and cups, the thousands upon
thousands of pairs of glasses amassed in a tangle like a surreal
tumbleweed. e baby clothes crocheted by loving hands for babies
who never became children or women or men. e 67-foot-long glass
case ĕlled entirely with human hair. We count: 4,700 corpses
cremated in each ĕre, 75,000 Polish dead, 21,000 Gypsies, 15,000
Soviets. e numbers accrue and accrue. We can form the equation—
we can do the math that describes the more than one million dead at
Auschwitz. We can add that number to the rosters of the dead at the
thousands of other death camps in the Europe of my youth, to the
corpses dumped in ditches or rivers before they were ever sent to a
death camp. But there is no equation that can adequately summarize
the effect of such total loss. ere is no language that can explain the
systematic inhumanity of this human-made death factory. More than
one million people were murdered right here where I stand. It is the
world’s biggest cemetery. And in all the tens, hundreds, thousands,
millions of dead, in all the possessions packed and then forcibly
relinquished, in all the miles of fence and brick, another number
looms. e number zero. Here in the world’s biggest cemetery, there is
not one single grave. Only the empty spaces where the crematories and
gas chambers, hastily destroyed by the Nazis before liberation, stood.
The bare patches of ground where my parents died.
We complete the tour of the men’s camp. I still must go to the
women’s side, to Birkenau. at is why I am here. Béla asks if I want