Auschwitz: It’s hard to explain what this means to me and how terrified I am

Genocide is an issue I write about a lot in my career. This, however, is extremely personal.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.

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The entrance gate of the Auschwitz concentration camp. (Photo by Omar Marques/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

I am going to Auschwitz.

It’s hard to explain what this means to me and how terrified I am.

I grew up in a Jewish community in New York watching Holocaust documentaries, speaking to old survivors. I’ve realized in the last number of years that my generation is the last that has a direct connection to the people tattooed with prisoner numbers — the men and women who somehow survived the genocide.

It wasn’t unusual for me as a child to spend Sundays in my small bedroom watching my tiny, boxy TV. First, I’d watch “Abbott and Costello” in black-and-white. Then “Laurel and Hardy” would come on. Then maybe “The Little Rascals.” Then, like clockwork, there would be some documentary about the Holocaust — or maybe I just sought such things out.

All I know is that I grew up with a horror of ovens. I feel the same to this day.

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I have a very hard time with cremation. It makes me think of the deepest inhumanity of the Holocaust, and the burning alive of people like the allied spy Nour Inayat Khan, a British agent with the French resistance who was one of the few key women radio operators. Their life expectancy behind enemy lines was maybe six weeks.

I grew up seeing still shots of thousands of childrens’ shoes in deflated piles at concentration camps. Sewn yellow stars on gray-and-white rags. Men and women with a single suitcase each, thinking they were being relocated, yet being marched to their death.

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I studied images of emaciated Jews and others as they lay in their bunks, stacked three high, one level much too close to the next. I tried to understand how the human body could survive looking so skeletal. I later learned that well-meaning British and American soldiers who liberated the camps gave the starving prisoners food, only to watch them die as their shriveled bodies rejected the nutrition.

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In 2014, I went to Rwanda. It was the 20^th anniversary of the three-month genocide that had killed nearly 1 million people. The story I wrote from it has long been one of the articles I am most proud of. While there, every single person I met had a memory of the genocide, and likely family members killed.

I tried to understand how the hell this country was still moving forward. It seemed impossible to me — how does a country so deeply traumatized keep going? I learned a lot about how in the story I subsequently wrote for The Atlantic.

In 2003, as a young journalist, I got wind of a story I wanted to report in a small town in Maine, close to the Canadian border. The town was hosting a celebration for four World War II Nazis who had been held in a prison camp in their potato fields. (Hundreds of thousands of Germans, Italians and others were detained in U.S. camps, although few know about this.) NPR’s “This American Life” took the story. A producer and I went to Maine. It was an extraordinarily chilling experience, one that now lies in the dirt with all old men who fought for the Nazis. But I have endless recordings of them and the townspeople. I’ve been thinking for years about how best to use these minidiscs. I still don’t have the answer.

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My family comes from Russia — or at least areas that later became Russia, like Bessarabia.

When I was in Ukraine last summer, I visited Kyiv’s killing field, Babyn Yar, where, in two days, more than 33,000 Jews were shot into ravines to die.

Bessarabia lies (relatively) nearby, within current-day Moldova. Nearby Odessa saw the largest single one-day massacre in the war. Before that, my immediate family had fled pogroms in the area, landing in New York City.

During the war, Jews were shot in multiple mass killings before the crematoria even existed. The thing that rips me apart is not knowing what family members of mine were murdered in the region — I don’t know their names, where they lived. I even recently contacted the Holocaust Museum in Washington; they do family tracing. The problem is, I only know that my father’s grandfather and father were originally named Wolfowitz (Wolfovic?) when they arrived to Ellis Island in the early 1900s, only to have their name changed to “Wolfe.” The person who tried to help me said I needed more information than a common last name and a few years in which they may have departed.

But I have no doubt that many of my family members, both on my mother’s and my father’s sides, were murdered in the Holocaust. The numbers in present-day Moldova are varied, but the U.S. State Department says that more than 105,000 Jews were killed in Bessarabia during the war years. Fewer than 1,000 Jews survived in the area. About 14,000 are estimated to have survived incarceration in camps and ghettos in wartime Transnistria, which included Odessa as the capital.

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I am going to Auschwitz soon, something I always thought I would do but never actually planned on.

I am going because I will be part of a journalism conference where we will have access, apparently, to information inaccessible to the general public. I want to know what’s there.

At the same time, I will need to hold myself together.

Genocide is an issue I write about a lot in my career. This, however, is extremely personal. Just as seeing Babyn Yar was.

When I visited this killing field in Kyiv last summer, I wrote for The Guardian: “Unearthing the dead and witnessing evidence of their torture is a brutal and painstaking process. Many crimes will never be accounted for. Too much evidence has been destroyed already.”

After I go to Auschwitz in a few weeks, I will go on to Kyiv, where I have a new important story to report. As I wrote about Babyn Yar in that same Guardian story: “much of what we do know was gathered by journalists who visited the site when Kyiv returned to Russian control in 1943. They interviewed three Russian prisoners of war who had survived the massacre, and they toured the site, finding bones and shoes and other remnants of the dead.”

Visiting Auschwitz will be uniquely painful. Going to Ukraine to further the reporting on the war will be what makes it meaningful.

Alan Barth, an editorial writer at The Washington Post, once said that journalists write “the first rough draft of history.” My hope is to write what I learn on this trip with as much context and accuracy as possible. That makes this emotionally difficult journey, to me, worth it.

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