ReligionDispatches.org

When I was 20 years old I boarded a train for Auschwitz. The year was 1992. Courtesy of 10 years at a predominantly Jewish summer camp in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I was probably the only Arab child that ever grew up fearing the Holocaust. I took the initiative of seeing with my own eyes a place whose existence is held to be an absolute truth by some, so much so that its denial is punishable by law in some countries. Nonbelievers have told me that it didn't exist. Typically this debate is about heaven. What I saw was hell. It was a dreary winter day. Having arrived in Berlin, I connected to Krakow where I took a cab to the camp. Walking around, I absorbed the unfathomable. That same winter I also visited Terezin in Czechoslovakia and Dachau in Germany trying to wrap my mind around what I had seen. I remember wishing I could go back to the days when the only Jewish camp I had ever set foot in was in New England.