On Sunday, 15 July 2018, I rode a bus for about two and a half hours to reach the town of Oświęcim, Poland, better known in the English-speaking world by its German name, Auschwitz. There I spent three and a half hours on a guided tour (it’s mandatory to join a group, for reasons I surmised later) of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial, located on the site of the infamous World War II Nazi death camp.
The Auschwitz Visitor Center sees a lot of tour buses and tourists (15 July 2018).
After going through some rather strict security (even my newly acquired, smaller Sri Lankan man-purse was too big and I had to leave it at bag-check; only bags the size of fanny packs or clutch-style purses were allowed in), our English-speaking tour guide led us through the infamous camp gate (15 July 2018).
“Arbeit Macht Frei” — “work will set you free.” That’s not what happened here. My grimace is due to my squinting in the sun. I forgot to take my shades out of my man-purse when I checked it. I also neglected to put on sunblock. These two factors, I believe, had a meteorological effect, causing the only mostly sunny day I experienced during my week-long stay in Kraków. Which is a good thing, since I left my umbrella in my bag too (15 July 2018).
My first impression on entering the Auschwitz I camp: “This looks like military base housing.” And that’s exactly what it was originally built for — it was a Polish army barracks during the inter-war years. After Germany overran Poland in 1939, the Nazis turned it into a concentration camp, first for Polish political prisoners, and then for Jews and all other groups they intended to liquidate (15 July 2018).
The Nazis added high fences and guard towers to keep their prisoners in. Despite these precautions, a few hundred people escaped the camp over the years, mostly by sneaking away after they were sent offsite to do forced labor (15 July 2018).
Nobody imprisoned at Auschwitz would have wanted to enter this building (15 July 2018).
Entering the camp’s buildings, it became clear to me why you have to visit Auschwitz as part of a tour group. The structures are just not big enough to accommodate the volume of visitors here unless they keep moving, conveyor-belt style. The compromise the directors of this museum have made, to allow as many people as possible to experience this place, is to have a tour guide hurry everyone along. There were plenty of points during the tour where I really wanted to pause and examine one or another exhibit carefully, but if I did, I’d quickly be enveloped by the Polish- or German-speaking group closing in from behind (15 July 2018).
You can imagine the awfully cramped conditions here. The people interned here slept like cattle in a barn (15 July 2018).
15 July 2018
Many of the displays here consist of enormous piles of belongings pilfered from the prisoners, either as soon as they arrived or shortly before or after they were murdered.
A big heap of eyeglasses (15 July 2018).
A reminder that disabled people were among the first the Nazis decided to exterminate (15 July 2018).
Enough luggage to fill two boxcars easily. Jews were told to pack a suitcase, since they were going to Auschwitz to be “resettled” (15 July 2018).
The hulking heaps of glasses, prosthetics, luggage, shoes, and hair were hard to comprehend. What affected me most were individual displays, like this one little girl’s clothes. (It reminded me of Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List, of how the movie was in black and white except for the one little girl in red who periodically appeared in the background.) Small children were useless to the Nazis as slave labor, so nearly all of them went straight to the gas chamber on arrival. Aside from the obvious horror of this for the victims and their families and for almost any sane person, really, I wonder what the psychological effect was on the Germans who sent all of these men, women, and children to their deaths. I don’t care how much Nazi propaganda you were force-fed about how the Jews are an evil race polluting the “Aryan” bloodline. How could you look an innocent child in the face and send her off to be slaughtered? For anyone who wasn’t a psychopath, it must have been traumatizing (15 July 2018).
Those pellets on the right are Zyclon-B, the chemical German chemists discovered worked most efficiently to kill millions of people in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the other death camps (15 July 2018).
This structure served briefly as a crematorium for all of the people the Nazis murdered in the Auschwitz I camp. The Nazis, however, very quickly realized, as the Final Solution evolved, that this facility was far too small to incinerate the number of dead bodies the camp would generate. Hence the industrial-scale operation they constructed at Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, a couple of miles away, where the vast majority of the victims of Auschwitz died (15 July 2018).
And not everyone at Auschwitz died in the gas chambers. Particularly before the Birkenau camp was built, the Germans executed many people by firing squad right here. Usually these were people who tried to escape, who were disobedient, or who otherwise aroused the ire of the guards (15 July 2018).
The first half of the tour covered Auschwitz-I, the original camp here that for most of its life was mainly a concentration camp, rather than a death camp. After a 15-minute break, our group took a bus a couple of miles to Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, the sprawling facility the Nazis built from 1941 to 1943 to carry out mass murder on a truly industrial scale.
The Birkenau camp is massive. Rather than the military base look of Auschwitz-I, Auschwitz-II looks like a huge, flat, agro-business-type farm, extending practically to the horizon in all directions (15 July 2018).
With ruthless, industrial efficiency, the Germans shipped Jews by rail directly to Birkenau in overcrowded boxcars like this one. The journey alone killed many of the occupants before they even arrived (15 July 2018).
The survivors of the journey would then be herded one by one to this very spot, where a Nazi official would decide their fate. If he pointed to his right (about 20% of the time), the person was deemed fit for slave labor and was sent off to camp housing. Such people usually only lived for several weeks before succumbing to starvation and exhaustion. If the Nazi pointed left, those 80% or so went straight to the gas chambers (15 July 2018).
The Nazis destroyed as much of Birkenau as they could before the Soviet Red Army liberated it in January 1945. A few of the camp’s housing units, like this one, have been restored (15 July 2018).
Most of the housing was destroyed or has succumbed to the elements, leaving only the chimneys standing. But even just those demonstrate clearly enough how vast this camp was (15 July 2018).
The Nazis made a special point of blowing up the gas chambers and crematoriums in 1944-45 before they abandoned the camp. The Auschwitz Museum has elected to leave them in their crumbling, ruined state. Right here, this is where most of the 1.1 million people who died here were murdered. Again, the numbers are so vast it’s impossible for me to fully grasp them (15 July 2018).
The Nazis dumped the ashes of the Jews and others they murdered either in the nearby river or in ponds like this one. In the absence of bodies to bury, there’s a small memorial in front of this pond to remember the dead (15 July 2018).
Heavy stuff. What I take away from all this is that, as a fully functioning human being, you have to retain your basic empathy for others. Genocide can only happen when people choose to believe in some hateful ideology that denies the humanity of others who are different in some way. Auschwitz is a reminder of what horrors can occur when people decide to over-emphasize differences between “us” and “them” to such an extent as to deny that “they” are human beings at all.