Auschwitz/Birkenau

May 7, 2012 - Auschwitz & Birkenau

I cannot express in words what this day was like but I am going to try.  I knew before we left for the trip that this was going to be one of our stops, it was something that I had been looking forward to and dreading all at the same time.  Being a social sciences education major, the holocaust is something that I have always found fascinating and horrifying.  How did the Nazi's pull it off for so long without the rest of the world figuring out?  

The bus was very quiet as we got closer to the main entrance.  There were signs along the way (see below) as we approached letting us know we were getting close to Auschwitz and the day that would impact our lives forever.  I remember sitting there and getting my camera ready and getting myself ready for what I was about to see.  There really is no getting ready when you visit a place like this.  The weather was quite appropriate for our visit, it was an overcast and dreary day.

Below is a map at the main building to Auschwitz that shows the many different areas that made up the whole of Auschwitz.  The main entrance where we were waiting for our tour guide was at Auschwitz I, the place where the famous gate is...you'll see it further down the page.  There were other locations, including Birkenau (Auschwitz II), the death camp that we were going to visit.

This was posted outside of the main building as well.  If you cannot read it, it says:

"Throughout the world, Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, genocide, and the Holocaust.  The German forces occupying Poland during the Second World War established a concentration camp, on the outskirts of the town of Oswiecim, in 1940; the Germans called the town Auschwitz and that is the name by which the camp was known.  Over the next years it expanded into three main camps: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz and more than forty subcamps.  The first people to be brought to Auschwitz as prisoners and murdered here were Poles.  They were followed by Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies and deportees of many other nationalities.  Beginning in 1942, however, Auschwitz became the setting for the most massive murder campaign in history, when the Nazis put into operation their plan to destroy the entire Jewish population of Europe.  The great majority of Jews who were deported to Auschwitz - men, women, and children - were sent immediately upon arrival to death in the gas chambers of Birkenau.  When the SS realised that the end of the war was near, they attempted to remove the evidence of the atrocities committed here.  They dismantled the gas chambers, crematoria, and other buildings, burned documents, and evacuated all those prisoners who could walk to the interior of Germany.  Those who were not evacuated were liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945.  

On July 2, 1947, the Polish Parliament established the State Museum of Oswiecim - Brzezinka on the sites of the former camps at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau.  In 1979 these camps were formally recognized by UNESCO by their inclusion on its World Heritage List.

PLEASE BEHAVE APPROPRIATELY, RESPECTING THE MEMORY OF THOSE WHO SUFFERED AND DIED HERE."

We got our tour guide and drove our bus over to the site of Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

This is what you see when you pull up, barbed-wire fences that were once powered with the force of electricity to keep people in and keep other's out.  Also see a lot of buildings and foundations of buildings and the main gate where the train cars came through each and every day, carrying thousands of people to their deaths if they hadn't died along the way.

This was the main building that the train passed through into Birkenau.

This was our tour guide who led us through both camps.  She was a wonderful woman who actually had family who lived nearby when the camp was in operation, she told us that her family remembers seeing the smoke from the crematoriums and smelling the smell of burning bodies.  She also told us how many people in the community that surrounded the camps would sneak food and supplies over through the fences to prisoners, to do what they could for those there.

These tracks carried so many to their deaths, they are almost a grave site in themselves.

This is a train car, a cattle car, that was like those that brought people into Auschwitz.  There were no windows, no food, no bathroom.  Hundreds were packed on top of each other, many died on the journey there before they were sorted out and most were lead to their deaths once they arrived.

Fences and guard tours were everywhere.

This is the memorial that stands in the back of Birkenau, near the demolished gas chambers and crematoria.  There are plaques in many languages and flowers and candles and rocks left in memory of those who died.

I had been doing well until this point and then the tears came for me.  It is like Dr. Clark said, it is soul wrenching.  Not heart wrenching but it hurts to the very core for each and every person who passed through those gates, those who died and those who lived.

This is the site of crematoria II.  The Nazis destroyed them when the war was coming to an end and they knew that they had lost.  The only one that is still standing is at Auschwitz I.  They have left the remains in tact for all to see and remember.

We left the site of the crematoria and walked back up to the barracks where people were kept and "lived", if you can call it that.  The Nazis kept hundreds of people in these buildings with very little heat, wood planks to sleep on, limited clothing, and horrible sanitary conditions.

Our tour guide said that often times, as many as eight people would sleep per bunk.  Think of  eight grown men squeezing together on one of these bunks.  If someone died during the night, they weren't taken away until the next day.  They were packed in like sardines, the Nazis believed them to be less than human.

There were commands written on the walls in German in every one of the barracks.

Some were wood, some were brick.  This one below was a stable that got converted into a sanitation room.

Our guide told us that if a woman was pregnant or with a baby, they were automatically sent to the gas chamber.  However, there were eight children born in Birkenau that survived she said.  The prisoners all kept watch and many times the baby was kept inside of the toilet area while the mother was out working because the SS Soldiers would not enter the buildings due to the smell.  They were safe from discovery there.

This barrack was converted from a stable to sleeping quarters.

One small stove to heat an entire building for hundreds.

After we left Birkenau, we rode our bus back to Auschwitz I.  There we went through the welcome center and received headphones so we could hear our tour guide as we went from building to building.  There were a lot more people touring the main camp versus Birkenau. 

Again, it was lined with electric fences everywhere.

This is the famous gate that tells the biggest lie, "Work will set you free."

These buildings made up the sleeping quarters, prison cells, medical/experimental buildings, torture rooms.  They all look the same and no one would know what each one had once held unless they were told.

From a glance as you walk through, you could almost picture it as a peaceful and 

Inside this building housed the collection of items that the Nazis took from people as they came in.  

Nothing was spared as they had people strip and leave their belongings behind before walking into their death in the gas chambers.  These items represent lives that were lost, lives that could have been great.  

Suitcases

Shoes, each represents a soul lost.

Hairbrushes.

There was also a case of eye glasses and another full of crutches, walkers, prosthetics.

The worst moment for me was as we entered a new room and our tour guide had told us outside of the room that no pictures were allowed in the next room.  What waited in there hit me like a brick.  It was an entire wall covered with glass, behind that glass was hair.  Hair that had been shaved off the heads of each person that entered the camps.  I cry now as I think of that moment.

In the hallways were pictures of the prisoners, names, ages, occupations.

So much loss of life, for what?

Everyone was tattooed as well for identification purposes and record keeping purposes.  

The Nazis kept everything and kept records of everything.

Each prisoner also had a symbol on their clothing representing who they were.

Dr. Mengele and other doctors carried out horrific experiments on the prisoners.  Men, women, and children, the handicapped, twins and triplets ... no one was safe.

The clothing of some of the children brought to the camp.

Starvation was another method of extermination.  Walking skeletons.

These warning signs were everywhere along the fences. 

Many people committed suicide by throwing themselves onto the fences.

Block 11 was the prison within a prison.  This is were many were tortured and punished.  There were standing cells in the basement where they would leave people for hours, days at a time with only room enough to stand.  It was another hell within hell.

This is the execution wall just outside of Block 11. 

These are the windows of Block 11, the building next to it had their windows boarded up as well because they could hear what was happening many times in Block 11.  Plus the execution wall was between the buildings..

This is the site where the commander of Auschwitz, Rudolph Hoess was hung after his trial in Warsaw and being sentenced to death. This gallows was built specifically for him to be hung there at Auschwitz, right behind crematoria I, where so many were put to death under his command. 

The last stop on our tour of Auschwitz I was the first crematoria and the only one still in tact.  As you walk up, it looks as if it is just a chimney sticking out of a grass covered hill.

As you go around to the front of the building, there is nothing that calls your attention to the place.

It looks almost like a bunker.  Beyond those doors waited death.

The pictures below are inside of the gas chamber.  

This was the hole in the ceiling where the deadly chemical Zyklon B was dropped and killed anyone who was inside by poisoning the air and suffocating them.  There were even places where the Nazis could watch what was happening inside as people crawled over each other trying to get clean air.  The bodies were almost always found in a pyramid formation as they climbed to the top before dying.

Below are the pictures of the cremation room.  The giant furnaces that burned the bodies of the dead.

My visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau will forever be tattooed on my soul.  There really aren't words enough to explain the experience and feeling of being there, it is something one must do and not just read about.  This was by far the hardest entry to my blog for so many reasons.

On our bus as we left, no one spoke.  It was extremely quiet as we all reflected on what we had just seen and where we had just came from.  It was almost a surreal moment in time, were we really there?  Did this really happen in our world?  How did this happen?  Why? Why? Why?