Still-vivid horrors

Regarding “Suffering and resolve: Walking with survivors on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz” (February 18), when I went on the March of the Living several years ago, I was paired with an 83-year-old woman, Sylvia Kagan, who wanted to find the barracks in which she had been imprisoned when she was 16 years old. The first thing she said as we walked through the infamous gates of Birkenau was “there was no grass growing when I was here.”

As we walked though endless barracks looking for her particular one, she pointed to the double electrified fence surrounding the camp. Ordinary people walked on the road outside, she explained, and occasionally would throw an apple or piece of bread inside. She recalled how on one occasion, someone threw a roll that landed in between the two electric fences. For the starving girl in front of her, this was too much of a temptation. She ever so gingerly extended her hand through an opening in the fence to retrieve the roll, when suddenly, smoke began coming out of all of her orifices. Sylvia recalled that no matter how starved she was, she never went near the fence. For her, and for all of us, the horrors of that place and time were as vivid as they were decades ago.

As Anat Barber points out in her article, seeing Auschwitz through the eyes of a survivor, is to experience viscerally the unspeakable murder that took place there. MARION REISS

Beit Shemesh