Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland

Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes Free)
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Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland

Auschwitz-Birkenau

We must remember not to forget

Before diving directly into my commentary about this part of the trip, I just want to begin with a comment that when I started this blog, it was the end of April, and now it is mid May. This blog has been the most difficult blog to write and especially to finish, as I have found I can only bear to focus on it for short periods of time. Also, this part of the trip took place at the end of February, and the detail that is included in this entry does not even come close to the detail that remains in my memories from our visit to Auschwitz; it is simply as close as I can get to forming my thoughts into words. Also I apologize for not having more pictures of the original Auschwitz camp. It simply didn’t feel right taking pictures for most of the tour. I have borrowed two pictures from the internet to illustrate my story, but the rest are my own.

The railroad entrance to Aushwitz-Birkenau
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Never in my life did I ever expect to visit Auschwitz, but I was certainly excited about the opportunity. A few hours bus ride from Krakow, we all chatted while watching the Polish countryside roll by out the windows. The topic of Auschwitz did not really come up in anyone’s conversations on the way there, but I am positive it was on everyone’s mind. For about the last thirty minutes of the drive, I watched the train tracks that ran parallel to the road. Images of the Holocaust that I had seen in the museum in DC, in textbooks, and from films floated through my mind as I imagined what it would have been like to be crammed in a cattle car, riding on these same train tracks, to some unknown destination and fate.

Panorama of Birkenau that doesn't show up very well
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When we arrived, all we could see was the visitor center, where we walked in and met our tour guide. Inside, there were pictures from the two camps. I never knew that Auschwitz had been expanded and a whole separate camp had been built to accommodate the overflowing prisoners of Auschwitz. The second camp was called Birkenau. Our tour began at Auschwitz.

We were separated into groups of about twelve to fifteen people. The tour began by walking out of the visitor center, at which point one could see an iron fence surrounding a collection of nondescript gray buildings. We walked through the single gate in the fence, above which were the words: “Arbeit Macht Frei” which means “Work makes free.” It was absolutely chilling to walk under these fallacious words, thinking about the hundreds of workers who would return through this gate after spending the entire day slaving away in the many factories that were built surrounding the camp, and having nothing to look forward to when coming “home” except for a cold meager meal and an putrid, overcrowded quarters crowded with bunk beds and other people.

One of the smaller guard towers and the electric fence of Birkenau
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After we passed under the gate, we followed small roads between the buildings that we were told were all living quarters. We were told that most of them had been emptied and the interior restored, but nothing was left of how life used to be inside of them. There were three out of about twenty, however, that had been restored and living conditions replicated and rooms were turned into museum like exhibitions about life at Auschwitz.

The first one we entered was general information about Auschwitz. The number of people that passed through, the number that never left. Male, female, children statistics. I remember specifically a hallway where the walls were nothing but the faces and names of people who had been prisoners at Auschwitz. Putting an identity to such a tragedy, or rather putting hundreds of identities to such a tragedy, made it seem so much more horrifyingly real. Something that I had learned in my migrations and ethnic minorities’ class was that the people imprisoned in the death and detention camps were not only Jews. The demographic of prisoners of Auschwitz also included Gypsies and Polish intelligentsia.

The fence and part of Birkenau
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All of the individual rooms were themed. One of the first rooms we entered had hundreds of shoes filling half of the room protected behind a glass wall. I would have thought that having seen a similar display at the Holocaust museum in DC would have slightly prepared me, but I have come to (want to) believe that one cannot easily become numb to this sort of thing. It’s terrifying how easily people did. Seeing the shoes in this setting was actually very different for me. In DC, the shoes surround you, hanging from the walls and the ceiling of the room, but they all seemed to look the same to me when I was there. In this building at Auschwitz, the shoes were piled neatly behind the glass wall, so I took more time to look at each individual pair. I immediately noticed how different they all were. They were of course of all different sizes, from babies’ shoes to large men’s shoes, but one could also tell that the shoes represented the many different walks of life that their owner’s once belonged to before being equally dehumanized. There were silk slippers, wooden clogs, leather work boots, leather dress shoes, thong sandals made of twine, ornately decorated and (once) colorful pumps, baby’s slippers and plastic sandals, and so many more. It was easy to imagine the people that once filled those shoes as they all arrived from different parts of Europe, but it was extremely difficult to think about the fate they met as soon as they were asked to remove them.

The toilets of Birkenau
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After we spent time looking at the shoes, there was another room with a similar glass display case except this one contained kitchen materials, eye glasses, and other sorts of odds and ends that were confiscated from the prisoners when they handed over the suitcases that hadn’t been looted on the way. There was also another section devoted only to baby clothes and baby accessories. Heartbreaking.

A particularly memorable, though disgusting, part of the tour of this building was a display case of a pile as large as the shoe pile human hair. In separate glass cases surrounding this one were various articles of clothing. Our guide told us that one of the uses of the hair collected from prisoners before entry into the gas chambers was used to make clothing in the factories where prisoners worked, and these clothes were sold all over Europe to make money for the Nazi regime. The buyers, however, had no idea the source of the material their clothes were made out of. It’s revolting.

Birkenau
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After this room, we walked outside and down the street to a large alley between two buildings that looked just like every other alley except for the flowers that had been placed on shelves on the wall surrounding the camp. Our guide informed us that this was the “shooting wall” and was the place where quick fixes were performed for problem prisoners. Often the deviant prisoner him/herself would not be killed. Instead, if he or she had family members within the camp, they would be the ones sacrificed for the misbehavior of the prisoner. She also pointed out that the windows of the adjacent buildings were boarded off and the walls were sound proofed, so that no one in the surrounding area would have knowledge of what was happening.

Our guide told us that one of the adjacent buildings was an infirmary, and I was really confused about why they would have a place to make people well when they were the source of people’s ill health. Once we started the tour of inside the building though, our guide explained to us that some of the rooms were indeed for helping ill people, but that this was also the place where many experiments were performed on prisoners by Josef Mengele, the later infamously nicknamed “Angel of Death.” Mengele was known for his horrific experiments on prisoners. Twins were a favorite victim/patient of his. I won’t go into detail about his experiments but only few of the 3,000 twins at Auschwitz survived Mengele’s torturous experiments.

Our visit took us next to the gas chambers. I was not sure what to expect at all, and when we approached a large mound of grass I was again perplexed. Our guide informed us that the chambers were under this mound so as to be hidden from the rest of the camp. She said the only signs that they even existed were the awful smell and smoke being emitted from the furnaces where the corpses were burned. My memories of walking through the gas chambers are a bit hazy, and I think it’s because I was in such a shock to be present where so many people had lost their lives. I remember seeing the holes in the ceiling, through which the cans of Zyklon B gas were dropped. We moved next to the furnace chamber, where all of the furnaces had been destroyed, but two were reconstructed to show visitors what they looked like. They were only big enough to fit one body in each, but there were many furnaces to speed up the disposal. Absolutely terrible.

After the gas chambers, we all got back on the bus to drive to Auschwitz 2: Birkenau. As we approached, the sheer size of the camp stunned me. I don’t even know what to compare the size to in order to accurately describe how big Birkenau is. The setup of this camp reminded me more of what I had seen in the movie about Sobibor. A large field had been cleared and barracks built symmetrically on either side of the train track that was constructed right to the center of the camp for easy entry of the prisoners. Look through my pictures for a panorama shot that I found on the internet. It shows the size of it and how only the chimneys are left of many of the buildings, because the Nazis attempted to destroy as much as possible as soon as they found out Allied troops were on the way.

Our tour began by entering one of the “bath houses.” All of the barracks looked the same from the outside. In the bath house there were three rows of stone that each had with about 40. These were the toilets that the prisoners were allowed to use twice a day, once in the morning before work and once at night, for a ridiculously short amount of time. Our guide told us that the prisoners were constantly yelled at by guards to hurry and were beaten if they were too slow.

We next saw the barracks, which was over crowded with bunk beds. Our guide mentioned to us to notice that the building itself was not even fully enclosed, as there was space between the roof and the walls. This and the fact that the “heater” was only for show made the winters especially intolerable for the prisoners dressed only in their pajama like uniforms and some who did not even have shoes.

After the tour of the sleeping quarters, we were all allowed to walk around on our own for a bit. Most of us headed for the main watch tower to get a higher view of the camp surrounded by tall electric fences and watch towers.

My visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau definitely gave me a new perspective on the Holocaust, and I most certainly encourage anyone who has the opportunity to take full advantage of it. Like my high school history teacher would always tell us, it may be painful to watch and to realize, but it actually happened and it’s better if we force ourselves to remember, so that we never forget.