Oswiecim, Poland
It has been hours since we returned from our visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp and I am still decompressing.
I spent most of the day both fascinated and horrified. Though photographs were allowed in almost every area of the camp (and I had planned to take photographs), upon entering the first buildings I immedately felt like photographing was inappropriate - at least for my purposes. So, please accept my apologies, but this blog post will mostly be my written observations and a few photos of the grounds and outdoor areas with only a few exceptions.
Rather then recount our entire 3.5 hours visit, I would simply like to share some details of the more compelling things we saw and heard.
There were two things I saw today that struck me most deeply, and I imagine will mostly likely stick with me for the rest of my life. The first was the faces in the prisoner photographs. One of the buildings had a corridor wall lined with hundreds of camp intake photographs of would-be holocaaust victims upon their arrival to the camp. Having one’s photograph taken for the Nazi records would have been one of the first things a person would have been subjected to upon arrival.
As I stuided the hundreds of faces of people in blue and white stripped uniforms, I saw a range of emotions. You could literally see the fear in so many eyes. Others eminated a deep anger. Some, pure exhaustion. Regardless of the emotions they had upon entering the camp, all of them ultimately had their lives taken at Auschwitz. Those faces were one of the most haunting things I have ever viewed.
The second deeply moving observation was the walls of the gas chamber. Only one intact gas chamber remains on either the Auschwitz or the Birkenau campuses. The more complex chambers at Birkenau were all destroyed and have been reduced to ruins. The first gas chamber located at Auschwitz, however, remains standing. Our tour group was allowed to enter the chamber silently. The gas chamber was a small square room with one chimney rising out of the top. There was no “changing area” for victims to undress under the guise of a shower here, so people would have simply had to strip in the open area outside the building.
At first, just being in a room where so many people were murdered (up to 700 at one time) was too overwhelming to notice any details. Then, the lady next to let out a small gasp. I turned to see her open palm on the gas chamber wall and that is when I noticed all the scratch marks. Nearly every inch ofevery wall was covered in fingernail claw marks, as high as a person could reach. At what point did those entering this chamber for the last time make the same observation?
In all the gloom and darkness of the day, there were a few glimers of hope in acts of resistance and human kindness shared among those held captive in the camp.
I learned today is that while many people turned a blind eye to what was happening in the camps, some people in the towns surrounding Auschwitz and Birkenau (after being forcibly relocated by the Nazis further away from the camps as they were being built) did contribute to resistance efforts. Early on, many of the surrounding residents kept and shared information on who had died, the names of their murders and made attempts at counting arrival trains which helped provide valuable information to resistance efforts and - in some cases - assisted as evidence at the Nuremberg trails.
One of the women in the neighboring town consistently brought food and left it just outside the fence in a remote area of camp. She did this small act of kindness and rebellion daily, until she was caught by an SS officer an sent to a concentration camp herself, where she died within a year.
A group of people we heard a lot about today, but that I had not given much thought to previously were the individuals tasked with cleaning up the gas chambers after the exterminations took place. Called, Sonderkommandos, their main job was to dispose of the bodies of the victims of the gas chambers. Typically, the strongest and healthiest of the young men arriving at the camps were selected for this job. Many had no introduction to the job they would be doing before being thrust into the work - often seeing friends or members of their own family among the dead. Because they knew the truth of what was happening, they were kept isolated from other prisoners in the camp. They had their own barracks and, typically, received slightly better rations and living quarters. The only way to be removed from this work details was death. Because the horriffic nature of what they had to do, many Sonderkommandos committed suicide.
From day to day smuggling of items to help their fellow inmates stay alive, to the group that blew up a the gas chambers in the Birkenau camp - several acts of resistance can be attibuted to this group of men tasked with a horrible job. My favorite act of resistance that I learned about today was in the form of the photograph steathily taken from inside a building (shown below - this is one of the few photos I took inside).
While sorting through personal affects at Auschwitz, a group of Sonderkommandos found a camera among someone’s belongs. Risking their lives, they were able to snap three photos of the attrocities being committed. These were some of the only photographs taken inside the camp by a source other than the SS. They were used as evidence at the nuremberg trials and central to the conviction of many of the SS officers.
In mentioning the personal affects of the people brought to the concentration camp to be murdered, I can’t help but write about the rooms of personal affects we saw. Over two tons of hair removed from victims of the gas chamber (forensic tests found traces of Zyklone B - the gas used in the chambers - in the hair tested) was piled four feet high in one room. Other displys exhibited piles of eye glasses, prosthetic limbs, suitcases and kitchen utensils (victims were brought to the camps under the guise of relocation, so they had all the items one would bring when forced to relocate). It is easy to remove oneself from the reality of how cruel humans can be to one another, though difficult to think about, I continuously reminded myself that each item represented the life of a person lost in the very place I was standing.
I was left numb as we made our way through the exhibit on children (many of whom simply showed their number to soviet soldiers because they did not know any other form of identification for themselves when the camp was liberated); Block 10 where Nazi doctors experimented on Jewish women and preformed forced sterilizations, and Block 11 - the most notorious of the blocks.
Here, in the basement, the first attempts at mass murder via gas were carried out. Here, we saw “standing cells,” the tiny rooms with almost no ventillation where prisoners being punished would have to stand 40+ in a room made for 8 all night before going back to work as slave laborers during the day. Here, we saw the “starvation cell,” a dark room, where Polish priest, Maximillian Kolbe, knowingly met his death after volunteering to take the place of an innocent man - one of 10 selected by SS as revenge for another inmate’s attempt at escape. Here, the kangaroo Gestapo Court was held to investigate acts of prisoner misconduct. Here, in the courtyard, was the infamous Death Wall where firing squads killed untold numbers of people (often immediately following a sentence of death by the Gestapo Court).
The Birkenau camp was - in many ways - physically easier to experience than Auschwitz. The museum aspect, the realness of the exhibits, the close proximity to so much agony was not there. The Birkenau camp, located about a 5 minute drive from Auschwitz, is huge. It is row after row after row of symmetrical buildings, long lines of train tracks and tightly packed bricks. Mentally, Birkenau is impossible to wrap your head around. This camp and everything in it was built exclusivly for the purpose of expediting murder. Not death. Murder.
During one 56-day period in the summer of 1944, over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Birkenau in cattle cars and exterminated.
We often hear about the horrid selection process that occurred upon arrival at the concentration camps. Men and women separated. People split from their families. Children torn from their parents. And SS doctors - with the wave of a hand - deciding people’s fate. Deciding in a seconds long glance who lives and who dies just by how a person looked after exiting a train with no food or water or bathroom facilities for days (maybe, weeks). This is grusesome enough, but I had always assumed that at least everyone who arrived was given a chance at the process of selection.
The truth is that often people didn’t even get that chance. If someone on the train was thought to be sick and contagious. If the SS overheard or believed that people on the train suspected what was going to happen. If no more workers were needed that day. If the camp was overcrowded with too many new arrivals. The train was simple instructed to drive to the end of the line and the passengers were marched directly to the gas chamber. No selection process. No intake process. Nothing to document that those people were ever there, except for perhaps, a lone shoe or a broken pair of eye glasses housed in a quiet room in a museum.
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