Visiting Auschwitz

It was hard to know how to describe this experience. I have tried to be factual and relate some of the thoughts and feelings of the people I went with.

While in Krakow, we visited Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Auschwitz was actually a collection of three main camps and about 40 subcamps. Over 1 million people died at Auschwitz, most of them Jews. The main prisoner camp, Birkenau, consisted of 300 buildings and could hold 90,000 prisoners at a time. The main gas chamber could kill 2,000 people at a time. That was the first horrifying thing about the experience: the utter scale of the camp. Today, you can see row after row of the chimneys of buildings that housed prisoners. When the Germans learned that the Soviets were coming, they destroyed most of the wooden buildings and all but one of the gas chambers and crematoria [destroyed gas chamber/crematorium pictured at right]. As such, little of the original Birkenau camp remains but those chimneys.

Upon arriving by train to Birkenau, each individual was told to go to the right or to the left based on a German doctor's assessment of their appearance (i.e. their fitness to work). The direction indicated whether individuals were either sent directly to the gas chambers (which occurred to ~75% of Jews) or kept at the camp to work. Those kept to work were processed in meticulous (and unnerving) fashion. Detailed photos and records were kept of each individual. We saw hundreds of these photos later in the day, and the expressions were haunting: some looked defiant, some looked resigned, and a few actually smiled. Every single person in the pictures we saw died within months of their arrival.

Those allowed to live did so in horrible conditions. Disease was rampant, food was scarce, work days were long, and any sign of disobedience was sharply punished. One thing that struck me was the conditions of the dormitories. I noticed that the bunk beds weren't long enough for an adult man. They were smaller than my bed at home, but were used to fit five at a time. Upon reflecting later, most of our friends from the hostel commented that while the tour itself was rather impersonal, it was our own personal reflections that were the most troubling.

As one example, there is a monument at the back of Birkenau with 22 separate plaques underneath, each one written in a language representing a nationality held in the camp. A Norwegian guy from our hostel said that it wasn't until he saw the plaque in Norwegian that it really hit him: people walked around the camp speaking the language he grew up with. People like him.

We also went to Auschwitz I, which has an entrance gate reading "Arbeit macht frei," ("Work will set you free"). It served mainly as an administrative center for the camp, but also housed many Soviet prisoners of war. We saw ghastly things: the "Wall of Death" [pictured] was in a courtyard between two buildings, and was where many prisoners were shot and killed. In the cells of the building next door, troublesome prisoners were starved, suffocated, or made to stand all night in confined conditions. The main commander of the camp lived with his family about 100m from the gas chambers.

I wanted to leave the experience continuing to wonder how people can deny that the Holocaust occurred. I did. On the way, we watched footage shot by the Soviet liberators of the camps and heard an interview with one of the cameramen. Upon their arrival, the Soviets found restless, haunted individuals expecting new threats from these armed soldiers; over 600 bodies; and an unbelievable amount of material confiscated from entering Jews. The scale of the camps was enormous, but many individuals didn't live long enough to stay there. The amount of items collected from arriving prisoners gives an indication of how many people died immediately. The meticulous records kept indicate the regular schedule and size of train arrivals.

I learned something interesting yesterday. In my last post, I mentioned the huge salt mine we visited while in Krakow. Apparently, miners hid many Jews in some of the mine's 2000 caverns and snuck food to them. That was an uplifting thing to hear after witnessing such a site.