Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau was probably the most sobering experience of my life. Auschwitz and Birkenau, the German names for the camps, were built on the site of the pre-existing Polish towns of Oswiecim and Brzezinka. The site is essentially surrounded by rivers, so it was very easy for the Germans to evict the townspeople at the start of the war and build massive concentration camps that were essentially shut off from the rest of the world. A quarter of the people who died in the Holocaust died here, more than one and a half million people. The historical information I have included is mostly from our museum tour guide, and I apologize for any inaccuracies.
At the entrance to the Auschwitz camp is the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign, which translates as "work makes you free".
Entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp. "Arbeit Macht Frei".
Auschwitz was originally used to detain Polish political prisoners after the Nazi invasion at the start of the war. Our tour guide explained to us that the Nazis were trying to create "Lebensraum", or living space, for the expansion of the German people into eastern Europe. Poles were treated like slaves - as an inferior race - and one of the first uses of the camp was to wipe out the Polish intelligensia. Later on it was used as a prison and death camp for Romani (Gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovahs Witnesses, the Catholic clergy, "anti socials", the disabled, Soviet POWs, and pretty much anyone the Nazis didn't like. By far the largest group of people murdered here were the Jews.
Electric fences surrounding the Auschwitz camp. Virtually impossible to escape.
Most Jewish prisoners were told that they were being "resettled", and would be given new homes once they arrived at the camps. They could bring up to 50kg in luggage with them, so people would have brought their most precious belongings, which would have been handed directly over to the soldiers for "disinfection". Upon arrival, the prisoners were divided into men and women, supposedly because they were going to be disinfected before being reunited with their families. There are photographs of people waiting patiently in line, and the soldiers aren't even carrying guns! The illusion of "resettlement" was so thorough, most people didn't suspect a thing. The Hungarian Jews even bought tickets for the train ride. Those that did look suspicious were taken quietly aside and shot with a silencer. A doctor would decide whether each individual was fit for work. Children under 13, mothers with small children, the elderly, the disabled, the ill... 75-80% of the people who got off the cattle cars weren't even recorded as having arrived at the camp before they were executed. They simply disappeared. The journey to the camps was gruelling and in terrible conditions, and after months or years of living in the ghettos many formerly able-bodied people were too ill to work. Our guide kept telling us, as long as you could work for them the Nazis would let you live.
The "Gates of Hell", Birkenau camp. There are train tracks through this gate, that passed the barracks before delivering those unsuitable for work directly to the gas chambers. Most prisoners would leave through these gates each morning to do physical labour. The guards were meticulous about Roll Call - if somebody died while at work outside the camp, his companions would have to carry his body back at the end of the day so he could be accounted for.
Birkinau train tracks. Beyond the fence and watchtowers are buildings used to house prisoners.
To the right you can see where many of the barracks have been knocked down. All that remains are the chimneys, which were never used because that would have been a "waste of fuel". At the end of the war the Nazi's tried to destroy any evidence of the Holocaust, including many of the crematoria and other areas of the camps. However, in their hurry they forgot to destroy the building plans, so historians have a fairly good idea of what the camps would have looked like.
Only one group of children were excluded from the gas chambers: identical twins. They were treated well at first by Dr. Josef Mengele ("The Angel of Death"). He would observe them for a few weeks and perform experiments on them before murdering both twins with an injection, then he would dissect them to compare their internal physiologies. He also experimented with changing eye colour by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, amputation, sterilization, shock therapy, vivisections of pregnant women, and "creating" conjoined twins by sewing the veins of identical twins together. Mengele was never brought to justice, and died in Brazil in 1979.
The complex had seven gas chambers and five crematoria, operating from 1941. Those rejected for work were told they were going to have a shower before being admitted. People wrote their names on their suitcases so as to get them back after, and were told to memorize the number of the hook they left their clothes on before they entered the gas chambers. The guards crammed in thousands of people into these rooms, as many as could physically fit. They would open hatches in the ceiling and pour in Cyklon B, solid hydrogen cyanide. The people closest to the hatches would die almost instantly, while it would take up to 25 minutes for others. After 25 minutes the room was ventilated, and other prisoners would be sent into the room, to search for jewellery and gold teeth which would be sent to Germany. They also cut off everyone's hair. There is a room full of bushels of human hair, which was used to make textiles in Germany. After that the bodies would be stuffed into the crematoria. Eventually they were gassing more people than the crematoria could handle, so they started burning the bodies in open-air pits. You could smell the burning flesh from 50 km away.
Gas chamber at Auschwitz. In the middle of the room is a memorial.
Crematoria at Auschwitz.
One of the best jobs in the camp was working in the warehouses, where they stored the goods stolen from those who arrived at the camps before shipping them to Germany. The people working here could pocket the food people had brought with them, and were protected from the elements when they worked inside, unlike most prisoners. What really struck a chord with me was that they called these warehouses Canada, the "promised land", because here you had a chance to survive and they were full of people's favourite possessions that they had brought with them in the "resettlement". It shows on the map of the camp "Canada I" and "Canada II" for the location of the two warehouses.
This is only part of what was literally a "mountain of shoes" on display. Behind the glass the room is stacked from floor to ceiling with shoes. Fashionable red heels for a fashionable young women, serious black lace-ups for a serious businessman. There was also a large pile of wire eyeglasses that was quite moving.
The average life expectancy for those who were selected to work in the camps was only 6 months. Many died from starvation or disease in the terrible living conditions. Most of Birkenau was constructed during the war, by Soviet POWs. Of the 15,000 who arrived at Auschwitz, only 92 survived until the liberation of the camp. Many were murdered as "guinea pigs" in the first experiments with Cyklon B.
The buildings they built to house the massive influx of prisoners were originally designed to be stables for 52 horses. Instead they would be used to house thousands of people. In order to make room for the new arrivals, the guards would go through every once in a while and select the prisoners who were sick or looked particularly tired and send them to the camp "hospital" - essentially the gas chamber waiting room. There are records of entire barracks being gassed when they became infested with lice.
One of seemingly endless rows of barracks at Birkenau. These buildings were designed for use as stables for 52 horses, and were instead used to house hundreds of people.
Bunks inside the buildings shown above. Hundreds of people would be crammed in here.
Punishment for misbehaviour or conspiracy was punished severely in the camp. At the morning Roll Call they would sometimes have public hangings as a deterrent to other prisoners. Sometimes they were punished by being crammed into a narrow box, less than 2 ft. square I think, with 3 other prisoners, and forced to sleep standing up for days on end after a gruelling day of physical labour. Sometimes they would hang them from their hands, which were tied behind their back, for an hour or so, until they could no longer use their arms. At this point they could be declared "unsuitable for work", and then executed. The original courtyard where the executions by firing squad took place is still there, with the original brickwork. The cement backboard is an exact reconstruction. Our tour guide told us of a guard who supposedly shot over 25,000 people.
Courtyard where tens of thousands of executions by firing squad took place. The brick wall is original, the cement backboard is an exact reconstruction.
The purpose of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum is to remind us all of terrible things people did to each other when one group of people decided they were better than another. There are two quotes I remember in particular that were on the walls of the Auschwitz museum:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. 1, 1905
Because it happened, it can happen again.
-Primo Levi (Italian-Jewish writer, chemist, and Auschwitz survivor)
Sadly, Primo Levi's quote has come true several times over in the 65 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, in Rwanda, Cambodia, Srebrenica... If everyone had the opportunity and took the time to learn about what happened at Auschwitz, I think people would be much more reluctant to use ideology as an excuse for the elimination of people different from themselves.
