Auschwitz and Birkenau

If I had to name one site I visited during my week in Poland, April 2 – 7, 2012, that left with me the deepest and most lasting impression, it would have to be Auschwitz and Birkenau, often referred to collectively as Auschwitz. The day we were there was Holy Thursday in the calendar of the Catholic Church, a day in preparation for Christ’s Passion and Death on the Cross, a rainy, gloomy day, under a low, grey sky. It was a very different journey from the happy wanderer’s visits to historic old towns and awe-inspiring monuments, magnificent churches and incredible salt mines. Movies and books about the Nazi death camps have told a lot of the horrors of the Second World War, but could not deliver the poignant reality that a visit to Auschwitz could. My trip to Auschwitz was a sad, sober, shocking learning experience, a harsh and raw confrontation of man’s shameful inhumanity to his own kind, in all its appalling magnitude, beyond any boundary of reason.

Led by a well-schooled guide no more than in his mid-twenties, who took us from the indoor prisoners’ blocks, cells and museums of Auschwitz to the mostly outdoor grounds of Birkenau, my group and I walked through one of the saddest times in human history. Through the entrance gate to Auschwitz, we filed in, past blocks of two and three-level red brick houses, identified by numbers, as were the prisoners who came to be just numbers.

The entrance gate to hell

Wall charts in the museum, housed in former prisoners’ blocks, told of 1.3 million, mostly Jews, but some from other ethnic groups too, deported to Auschwitz from various countries in Europe, of which 1.1 million died there, from overwork, starvation, torture, exhaustion from prolonged roll-calls in extreme outdoor weather, subjection to medical experiments, appalling living conditions, execution by firing squads or phenol injections, and most of all in the infamous gas chambers. Silently, in respect to the long dead, we filed through the rooms with glass encased displays of objects that once belonged to the prisoners who died in the camps: thousands of men’s, women’s, children’s shoes, clothing including children’s and babies’ overalls and smocks, hats and spectacles, suitcases, and, what struck me most, women’s hair, weighing hundreds of tons, collected in a display case that ran the length of one room, along with the fabrics that were woven with such. A painful ordeal to lay eyes on them, and yet they were there, to remind and shock. And when I walked through the narrow hall with photos of victims, some in their middle years, some too young to die, some drained and desperate, some with expressions still radiating hope, with their years of birth and death inscribed, I wept.

One of the prisoners' blocks at Auschwitz - on the right was an execution wall where prisoners were shot

At Birkenau, a short bus ride from Auschwitz, we saw low brick and wood buildings with chimney stacks, behind barbed wires. The chimneys were supposedly for furnaces used to heat up the prison cells. However, the cells were never heated, and living conditions remained most appalling. Led by our guide, we walked in the rain on muddy ground to the crossroad near the train tracks where the newly arrived prisoners had once stood. There, our guide described the scene of the arrival of one such train-load. The prisoners would be divided into two or three groups. Those too young or old or weak to work would be sent immediately to the shower, where they were ordered to strip and even told to remember the numbers on their clothing and belongings, for retrieval after the shower. Only in their last moments did they realize they were doomed inside the chamber of death, when the deadly gas, Zyclon B, descended from vents in the ceiling. Such a scene was to be repeated numerous times from the time the gas chamber was used for extermination of the prisoners in 1941 until 1945. By a forest at the far end of the camp, we saw ruins of the gas chambers and the crematorium, demolished by the Nazis before their surrender, to eliminate traces of their crimes.

 

Prisoners’ houses with chimney stacks at Birkenau behind barbed wire fences

Ruins of a gas chamber, blown up by the Nazis before their surrender

Finally, we stopped at the end of our route, where a modest stone monument to the dead at Auschwitz and Birkenau was erected, with a big arrangement of fresh white roses laid on its front step. On either side of the main monument were horizontal tablets at regular intervals, each with words in a different ethnic language cast on it, all a desperate, silent scream in the common language of humanity:    

    

Comments

[Sandy S W]

Beautifully written, very moving.