Következik is what the GPS said on the way to Auschwitz. Következik was my warning. It's coming, but I didn't want it to come. I didn't really want to see it, but I knew its necessity. I resisted it like a funeral. But I wouldn't see any bodies that day. I would only see where they were murdered. It's impossible to describe Auschwitz and Birkenau; from the Arbeit Macht Frei gate to the gas chambers I couldn't comprehend what I was seeing. Was that real? I just simply cannot fathom the horror of the Holocaust.

Experiencing history in Europe is drastically different than experiencing it in the states. The History channel, textbooks, museums, pictures-- they do not compare to walking the same path with the same dirt and nestled stones as thousands of Jews did 70 years before. It always feels like a movie.  Auschwitz and Birkenau are not backdrops though. That story is not fictitious;

mountain of shoes, valleys of hair, and cliffs of suitcases indicate only a fraction of the factual landscape. 

I will not forget this. But I also will not forget the hairless woman smiling amidst wide-eyed and scared eyes. The Nazis stole everything but they could not steal her decision to smile.