My knee bounced up and down for the entire ride as I tied to calm my nerves. My bubbe would have said that I had the “shpilkes,” a Yiddish word for the fidgets and jitters I’ve had my whole life. Crammed into the backseat of a van, I stared out the window into the grey countryside, and I couldn’t help but feel I was being shipped off against my will across the frozen European wastes. When we finally reached the end of our journey, I stepped out into a biting Polish frost. The winds were painful and unforgiving. Even with a heavy winter coat, thick wool socks, and long underwear, it felt like I was wearing nothing at all.

The roads were a mess of rubble. A mix of dusty craters and haphazard, lopsided bricks, jabbing their corners into the soles of my shoes as if walking on elbows.

The path led into the compound through a black wrought iron gate. Across the top, the gate read:

ARBEIT MACHT FREI

I was struck by how unnerving yet meaningless those words were. They are just three random words from a language I don’t speak, with a poor literal translation and almost no value to me on their own. Yet I’ve known these words and recognized the combination for a long time, and I found myself standing before the sole reason why I even have to remember them.

The first building we entered was curated as a museum. Along the walls were glass display cases filled with historical records and documents, the walls behind decorated with photographs of doomed families. In a nook in one wall sat a large glass urn, a memorial to the victims filled with real ashes.

I looked through the prisoner records in the next room and I came across a name:

21o57 Bednarski, Valentin 11. 2.01 Matschaikowitz, Arbeiter

My Bubbe’s name was Jean Bednarsh. Her father was born in Biala Podlaska, a town east of Warsaw, and her mother was born in Czestochowa, which lies just 70 miles north of Auschwitz. When my grandmother’s immediate family left Poland, they left behind relatives and friends, an entire world that would perish.

I had been dreading the prospect of seeing a family name somewhere, and I had now stumbled upon what could be a not-so-distant relative. I had considered the possibility of finding Rappaports etched into the history of the camp, but seeing a name so close to Bednarsh is just the same. It was the first thing that connected me as an individual into that place, and seeing that name solidified the bond of trauma between it and my family.

But a name is a name. There are thousands and thousands of Steins, Greens, and Rosenbaums in the world, and probably hundreds that share my family’s names. It’s hard to feel any real connection with a word on an old scrap of paper.

The first floor of the next building was the same as the last: wallpaper in drab greens and greys framing illegible German documents and chillingly familiar blurry photos. Each step to the second floor sank in the middle, worn down by the burden of starvation and death through heavy moccasins. The guide led us into the next room, and without warning I found myself in facing a small glass case filled with hair.

I had to look away, searching for anything less disturbing to focus on, only to find myself in front an entire wall of Jewish hair. My eyes became lost in the locks of hair shaved from murdered scalps. I surveyed each strand, wondering which contained my own DNA.

I walked quickly out of the room with my eyes set unwaveringly ahead of me, millions of follicles whirring past mine. Outside, a unique anxiety set in, a feeling that would persist throughout the rest of the day. It was a feeling that was completely new to me, unlike anything I had ever really felt. It’s a feeling that’s still impossible to put into words, but the two that first come to mind are “numb” and “horror.”

The next building began with a dogpile of suitcases stretched across the length of the first room, each marked with a family name. They were eerily familiar, many belonging to people I knew.

After passing the suitcases, I was dumped in front of the display of children’s shoes. But for some strange reason, I wasn’t taken aback like I should’ve been. My brain quickly employed a defense mechanism, almost in the form of disappointment towards the effort of the museum curators. It was as if I wanted to say, “seriously, you needed to use the children’s shoes to get some sympathy out of me?” As if the shoes were a crutch, and they should’ve used a more creative relic to draw emotion out of me. I don’t even know exactly what that means. I walked away feeling in control, telling myself I was unphased by what I saw.

On our way into the next room, I heard my friend Aubrey, the only other Jew traveling with us, exclaim, “they were just toddlers!” She came around the corner and I saw a tear rolling down her cheek. Seeing her, I felt guilty. I felt guilty for trying to suppress such a meaningful feeling. I felt guilty for trying to downplay the gravity of what I saw for the sake of my own emotional invulnerability. I then forced myself to be accessible to the full scope of Auschwitz’s terror.

After that, all I could see were shoes. Mounds and mounds of shoes, completely obscuring both walls of a long hallway, closing in on me from all sides. I was then hit with a sensation that I could never truly describe. It was a sensation of horror that I didn’t even know existed, that’s painful to write about weeks, even months, later. The shpilkes returned, and shivering fits coursed up and down my body as a terrible physical anxiety took hold of me. Everything was so overwhelming and I was completely unequipped to deal with it. I didn’t understand how to feel or what to do, so I let my hands try to keep my mind busy.

As a Jew, you always feel like you understand the Holocaust. You’re taught about it from an early age at Hebrew school, and you always knew more about it than the other kids at public school. When a fifth-grade social studies teacher first brings up World War II, you scoff at the other students’ shock. I always found it amusing how ignorant other kids were, having already got past the phase of wishing I could kill Hitler myself, a phenomenon I seem to have shared with numerous other Jews.

You feel a personal connection to the Holocaust, even if there isn’t anyone or anything to actually connect you to it. You are connected to the Holocaust through your community, your culture, but not as an individual. As a modern Jew, 70 years after the fact and two generations apart from the family members who weren’t even there when it happened, the connection is inherently impersonal. I realized that few things had actually linked me directly to the Holocaust.

In the old barracks, the walls of the central hallway are lined in photographs of former prisoners. I walked slowly down the corridor, making sure to read every single name. My eyes methodically combed the walls, tattooing each name into my memory. With only a few rows of picture frames left in the corridor, I stop at one of the photos.

The photo is of a young Polish man, probably in his thirties or forties. He wears a striped prisoner’s shirt, and his hair is buzzed. He has stern and defined features, from a broad jawline and pointed chin to high cheekbones that cut prominently through his face. He has a wide mouth and an upper lip that forces the skin on his cheeks to retreat. His nose is strong and powerful, and his thin eyebrows cover two passionately indifferent eyes.

His left ear is tucked neatly to the side of his head, while his right ear flies wildly outwards, in defiance of his otherwise coherent features. They are the same features that my aunt had plastic surgery to fix in 11^th grade. They are the same ears that my father has been self-conscious of ever since he started losing his hair.

The man’s name was Jan Bednarczyk. He was Polish. He was born on May 5^th, 1902, and he was executed on May 27^th, 1942. He was an accountant, and I have his ears.