The Shoes

We (my mother, father, sister, and I) were travelling in Poland (where my mother's family is from). One of the places we visited was Auschwitz.

Every year I teach about World War II including the Holocaust. I share photos from my travels with my students throughout the school year, but it is something I was not able to photograph that chokes me up every year. The shoes. There is a large room, really more of a warehouse, with what looks like a large aquarium along one side (glass floor to ceiling). It is mostly (and used to be) full of shoes. Over time the shoes have begun to disintegrate and settled, making the number look smaller than what they represent. Knowing that it was common for individuals to have only one pair, maybe two pairs, of shoes means that every pair represents a person. You can talk about the sheer number of people who died in the Holocaust, in World War II, but those are abstract and sometimes too large to comprehend. But the shoes make those numbers real - real people, real families, real lives lost...maybe people my mother's family knew or lived near or went to school with. People who were removed from their homes, put on trains, sorted when they disembarked, stripped of their possessions and identities and murdered. Every year when I talk about this with my students, I have to pause and collect myself. And every year I hope that I am providing a sense of the personal into our history class so they don't ask the question "why are we learning about this?"