Member-only story
Black Auschwitz
A visit to Ghana’s slave dungeons and platforms
I’ve been within driving distance of the Nazi death and slave labor camps in Europe, but as a Jewish man couldn’t emotionally bring myself to visit them.
I’ve traveled all over the world yet haven’t mustered the courage to visit Germany or Poland, except for a layover at the Frankfurt airport. Even that felt weird to me. Of course, today’s Germany isn’t the Germany of the 1930s and 40s, and the country is Israel’s second-largest trade partner.
Yet their history remains intense. Especially for Jews.
I can barely finish a Holocaust documentary without turning it off in tears.
I had four cousins all under the age of five who were slaughtered by the Nazis.
When I toured the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., shortly after it opened in 1993, I felt like I had been punched and kicked. All I could do is return to my hotel and cry for the rest of the day.
The museum tour ends with a giant pile of shoes from actual Jewish Holocaust victims. The shoes, and the death toll of children, hit the hardest. Over 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust.
