Day 28 - Warsaw, Poland

Day 28 – Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau

 

**Contains pictures and descriptions of the concentration and extermination camps**

 

This was probably the most stressful day of the entire trip.  We spent the day at the concentration and extermination camps of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau.  Auschwitz I is the camp most people think of when they think of Auschwitz – or at least the gate is.  It has the wide gate with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” emblazoned over the top.  It is surrounded by barbed wire on either side.  The buildings inside were not what I had expected at all.  The buildings were large and made of brick.  I have always thought of Auschwitz and thought of wooden barracks.  This could have passed for an apartment complex – at least on the outside. 

 

Arbeit Macht Frei

 

 

Auschwitz is divided into 24 “blocks” where each block is one building.  We only entered a few.  In one, they had exhibits of the belongings of the people who came to the camp.  All prisoners had to have their heads shaved upon entering the camp.  When the camp was liberated, on January 27, 1945, the liberators found 7 tons of hair.  2 tons were on display.  I have never seen so much hair in one place in my life and I hope I never have to again.  50,000 people had to be shaved for the quantity of hair on display.  The room must have been 40 feet long and there were just piles of hair on both sides.  Then there was the display of eyeglasses.  And the room full of prosthetics.  Then there were the suitcases.  The suitcases were just stacked, lining both sides of the room.  The Nazis made the prisoners write their names, birth dates, and place of deportation on the outside.  The hardest part was seeing the suitcases with birthdates in 1943 and 1944.  Those babies would have been one year old when they were sent to the camp.  There was also a display of shoes.  First there was the “small” display – the window about 6 feet long, holding a few hundred shoes.  Then you turn the corner.  Both sides of the room are piled with shoes.  40 feet long. On both sides of the hall.  The piles were higher than my head.  Thousands upon thousands of shoes.

 

Eyeglasses

Prosthetics

Dishes

Suitcases

Suitcase - Peter Eisler was born in 1942 according to his suitcase - he was only 1 when he was brought to the camp

Shoes - This is the small pile.  There were 50 times as many in the next room.

That wasn’t even the worst building.  That was in block 27, which is entirely dedicated to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.  The very first room is dark.  Then as you stand in the middle, pictures and videos are projected onto all four walls of the room.  Two girls in blue dresses were playing in the driveway, laughing, holding hands, and spinning in circles.  They faded away.  A girl with brown ringlets in a pink dress giggling as she picked flowers and put them in a basket.  She two faded to black.  Their laughter played through the room.  The oldest girl was maybe 7.  The youngest probably 4.  There were families at the beach, kids splashing in the ocean and digging in the sand.  Kids learning to ride a bike.  A large group of children singing at school – what I later learned was the Israel national anthem.  Kids dancing in circles holding hands.  The last images to show up were the family photos.  And watching the videos, you could tell they would all be gone within a few years.  The next room was a stark difference.  The walls were white and the room brightly lit.  And over the speakers this time was Hitler, and the other leaders of the Nazi party, giving speeches about their Final Solution.  The next room was all children’s drawings, copied exactly from both ghettos and concentration camps.  Some were of children playing – those were from the ghettos.  Then there were the other ones.  The gates of Auschwitz.  Mass executions.  People being hung.  People being shot.  Death.  It was really hard to see the events of the Holocaust through the eyes of a child – because you could tell that they were only drawing what they saw – no editorializing.  Then there was the room with the stories of the survivors – and those that didn’t survive.  A woman who volunteered to go to the camp with her sister because she didn’t want to leave her.  Her sister was sick and died just after liberation.  The healthy sister had left the camp when it was freed and brought back food to her sister – but she couldn’t eat it.  The sick sister called out all night for her sister – who didn’t hear because she too was being treated at the hospital and was asleep.  She died that morning.  Then there was the girl who kept a diary while in the ghetto – Poland’s version of Anne Frank.  When she was deported, she hid her diary under the stairs, as she had planned with a Polish friend.  She died in a concentration camp.  The last room was the Book of Names.  4 million names of the people who died in the Holocaust are inside.  There are still 2 million mission.  The book is about 16,000 pages.

 

Child's drawing of gallows

Child's drawing of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the selection off the train

 

Book of names

One of the other blocks (Block 11) was the punishment block.  Inside the basement were different punishment chambers.  Number 18 was for starvation.  In 1943, someone managed to escape the camp.  In punishment, the Nazis picked 10 people at random to execute.  One was crying that he didn’t want to die.  Maksymillan Kolbe, a priest, volunteered to take his place and was put in the starvation chamber.  He spent two weeks in there before being killed by a poison injection to the heart.  He was canonized by the pope.  The man he saved survived until 1995.  Number 22 was the small standing cells.  People were put in there every night for between 3 and 12 nights.  There was not enough room to do anything except stand.  The only door was a small opening on the bottom – otherwise the walls were bricked the whole way up.  There was an air hole the size of a postage stamp.

 

We also went to the gas chamber in Auschwitz I.  It is the only standing chamber left of the 3 Auschwitz camps.  The ones at Auschwitz II-Birkenau were all destroyed, mostly by the Nazis when they left the camp to try and hide their crimes.  One was destroyed in an uprising of the prisoners who were forced to work inside the chamber.  In chamber 3, which was one of the biggest, 2000 people could be killed in 20 minutes.

 

Auschwitz II-Birkenau was more what I expected.  The buildings were wooden huts.  The bunks were 3 levels tall and multiple people had to sleep on each one.  There were no exhibits here – just the camp.  There is a memorial at the end of the railroad tracks – 900 meters from the gate.  It has the same inscription in twenty different languages – to represent every language of the people imprisoned in the camp.  Only some of the barracks are still standing.  Amidst the foundations of the rest is a glass case.  It holds items that have been found in the camp – spoons, bowls, and combs.  Towards the back of the camp is the building where the new arrivals were sent.  In the first room they had to strip.  Then they went to the next room to be shaved.  The next room was the examination room – where if they didn’t pass, they were sent to the gas chambers.  After that was the room in which to dry off and then where they got their clothes.

 

Gate of Auschwitz-Birkenau

This is the memorial inscription in English.  There are 19 other plaques in other languanges

Remains of gas chamber 3

End of the tracks

The prisoners who worked sorting through all the belongings of other prisoners put all the photographs into a suitcase.  At the end of the war, a suitcase containing 5000 pictures was found by the Allies.

There were of course some who managed to escape.  800 tried but only 144 made it.  In June 1942, four prisoners managed to escape the camp.  They stole German uniforms.  Because they had the uniforms, they were able to steal the car of the commander of the camp – and they just drove away.  They were never caught.  One of them is still alive.  He’s 95 and visits every year.

 

One of the things that shocked me those most was that the camp was insured – the buildings and property were protected against fire.  The company who insured them is still in business – Allianz.  One other shocking thing was that Coca-Cola invented the drink Fanta for the German soldiers.  They were selling Fanta in the gift shop.  (Also shocking – why would you put a gift shop in a concentration camp?!)