Reflections Of A Humbling Tune

Music has paid a huge dividend to my traveling experiences. I always had my music playing during my travels. Whether I was on a long train ride or a nauseating bus ride to some far off destination, my music complimented the environment. My play lists are forever forged in my mind with visual memories of the people and places that I visited. I am now able to play back my memories in the form of a musical in my mind.

A single album comes to mind when I reminisce about one of the most emotional days of my trip. "Without You I'm Nothing," by Placebo played on loop for the 45 minute journey from Krakow to the concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland. I thought that I knew what this trip would do to me emotionally, but soon found out that I had under estimated the impact that the camp would actually have on me.

We pulled up to the bus stop near the entrance on a rainy afternoon. The Placebo album was still playing. I will never forget the song "Ask For Answers," because it played during my first steps under the camp's sign that reads in German, Arbeit Macht Frei, or, Work Makes You Free. I would have usually kept my music playing if I had been visiting any other type of museum or historic site, but I had an impulse that told me that by not removing my head phones I would be disrespecting those who had been contained there.

People of all ages gazed with disbelief at the cells that many prisoners called home for as long as they could survive during their encampment. Several beds of hay sprawled across the floor acted as a cushion for prisoners to sleep on. Right out side of this cell block stands the "wall of death." This is a wall where prisoners were taken to be executed for acts of insubordination towards German guards. I envisioned the prisoners inside of their crowded cells fearfully watching their fellow inmates get shot in the back. I attempted to choke back my tears. Some of the people around me bawled. I couldn't prevent myself from letting a few tears trickle out.

I was feeling famished from walking around, but my appetite was suppressed by the horrifying images that I had witnessed.
I moved among many cell blocks before stumbling across the gas chambers and the crematorium. The bricks above the massive furnaces were blackened from the smoke. The stained bricks were left to remind countless tours of people of the massive death toll that was the holocaust. An information board described workers known as "Sonderkommandos," prisoners who were forced to do this work or die, dragging bodies of other inmates into the furnace carts. I couldn't even begin to empathize with the prisoners or the other people touring the camp who had lost a loved one at this location.

My visit to Auschwitz was touching and extremely difficult to bear. When I listen to music, my mind tells a story behind it, but when I hear "Ask For Answers" I crack. My mind takes me through a type of time warp to that wet and foggy day that forever changed my perspective about life and death. More importantly, that song reminds me to stay humble and be thankful for every breath of air I am privileged to inhale.