The Twins Stayed Home While We Took Our Oldest to Auschwitz

Hi, friends! A few days home alone in the middle of the week, during the school year? Just a few years ago that would have been completely unthinkable for our kids and for us. Our twins fought like cats and dogs. For a long time they were the same height, the same weight, and the same strength, so for years we had to watch them settle all over again, every single day, who was top dog.

More than once those fights got so physical that a neighbor kid refused to come over anymore because he found it so disturbing. The rivalry between the two was truly intense, and sibling fighting dominated our lives.

Especially during the pandemic, when the kids simply couldn't get out of each other's way. They had the same schoolwork but couldn't sit in the same room to do it, because it escalated instantly.

Even sneaking away for a weekend as a couple, which we'd done once a year in the early years with the kids, was off the table, because we couldn't ask a babysitter or the grandparents to deal with the brawling.

Around age 14, though, the fighting stopped. There are still conflicts here and there, of course, but by and large the two have somehow found their places. And when they disagree these days, it's usually sorted out with words, or a slammed door, instead of hurting each other.

Now they're 16, and the last two years with them have honestly been the calmest of our lives, pure relief. “So this is what family life is like!” we often say. Everybody warned us about the teen years, but for us, other phases were much, much, much harder. We also have their sister, two years older, and we didn't want her to get lost in all the racket.

Home alone for the boys, an educational trip for our oldest

At some point our oldest, who's almost 19, said she'd like to make up the school trip to the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp that got canceled because of COVID, and do it privately with us. We parents had both been there before and could tell her ahead of time what to expect. She was interested, so we said: okay, let's do it during your college semester break. Her boyfriend came along too, and last Thursday evening we headed off to Poland.

We were all very relaxed beforehand. I didn't even pack my bag until 20 minutes before we left, because I got hit with a full-blown my-kids-will-starve-without-me mom attack and cooked a bunch of meals in advance. And then we were out the door.

The next morning we called at 6:30 to check whether the alarm clock for school had worked, and we were greeted with a cheerful “Hello, Poland!” So everything seemed to be running fine at home, and after a long breakfast we set off from Kraków for the memorial site.

Important for anyone thinking about doing this themselves: admission is free, but you still need a ticket (you can also book online), and you're given time slots to help sort out the crowds, so that not too many people are inside at once. There are two camps, with a free shuttle bus running back and forth between them. The first one, with the well-known entrance gate, is fairly spread out. We started there. The sun was shining, and you could look into individual barracks and, above all, try to picture in your mind the horrors that happened here.

We saw people in leggings, we saw people in sunglasses, we saw people directly affected, we saw youth groups and large groups of Jewish visitors, we heard snatches of languages from all over the world. The atmosphere was quiet, almost gentle, one of remembrance. It was good that there was so much space, that you could get moving when it all became too much.

Then we drove to the second camp, where the house of the Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss stands. It became famous through the film “The Zone of Interest” (with an outstanding Sandra Hüller in the lead role; the film won a slew of awards). The infamous sign reading “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work sets you free”), with its perfidious message, hangs over the path here too. Inside the various buildings, remnants are on display.

Thousands of shoes that belonged to the people brought to the camp, hundreds of suitcases, an enormous mountain of eyeglasses, a shelf piled with children's shoes.  

When the bus took us back to the first camp afterward, we were the only ones on board. The sun was already sinking, and not many people were still around, so we got this photo that I could sit in front of for hours, because it makes the horror so vivid, because it shows light where there was so much darkness.

We drove back to Kraków, we called the ones we'd left at home, who were out with friends in the next-biggest town after soccer practice, and we went up to a hotel sky bar, where from the terrace you looked out at a blinking Ferris wheel that gave you the feeling that the world keeps turning.

And then we headed home very early Saturday morning. So early that the twins were still asleep when we got in. They'd bolted the door and thrown no wild house party; the dirty plates on the coffee table only told us that the gentlemen had apparently been well fed while we were gone. They said they'd barely noticed we weren't there once they woke up. We could trade stories about everything we'd experienced... so intense, so good. #neverforget

And then it was right back to the soccer field and the horse and the college job, as if nothing had happened. Impressive.