Writing a blog post about a visit to Auschwitz is a very difficult thing. I don’t feel like I’m qualified or equipped to write anything about what happened there or what it means to people in general. Visiting the two main camps that made up the Auschwitz concentration camp site was a very emotional experience for us, and I don’t really feel like I can relate that to you by writing it down. Also, writing about an event so horrifying, both in its scale and its context in a blog where we also write parodies of Sound of Music songs and joke about The Producers and ‘Springtime for Hitler’ seems quite inappropriate.
I’m writing this from our van, less than three kilometres from the camps, and at the moment the experience is still so raw for me that I don’t know that I could write about it even if I tried.
I will, however, say that until I visited the concentration camp today, the concept of the holocaust was just a figurative one to me. Visiting the camp brought home a fragment of the horrific reality that happened here. I can’t describe how it felt apart from to say that in the past I have laughed along with many others at comedy that pokes fun at Nazi Germany - for instance The Producers, but today those jokes just don’t seem funny anymore.
I’m sure that as the tiny reality that I came across today fades into my memory, I might find The Producers funny once again, but for now, in this place, I don't.
All I feel like I can do here is give you a literal description of what I saw today, but first, a very little history.
Auschwitz is the German name for the Polish village of Oswichim. During World War II the Nazis occupied the village, drove out the citizens and turned the old Polish Army barracks into a concentration camp, initially for Polish political prisoners, operated by the SS. This camp is now known at KL Auschwitz I. Later, another much larger camp was constructed a little way down the road. This camp is now known as KL Auschwitz II - Birkenau. As the war progressed, more camps were built in the area, but all were known under the umbrella name: Auschwitz.
During the war at least 1,100,000 human beings were murdered there, primarily at Auschwitz II - Birkenau.
Today, we walked from our camping spot to the first camp, which is built on the southern edge of Oswichim. Today the area is an industrial estate, surrounded by warehouses.
The reception building is filled with signs in many languages providing seemingly conflicting information about the cost of entry and whether or not you need to be part of a tour group to get in. It turns out that it’s free and you don’t need a guide, or at least that’s the case at this time of year.
After leaving the reception building you enter a large courtyard, in the corner of which is a metal gate which has written across the top “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” (Work is liberating). On both sides of this gate are barbed wire fences held up by identical, equidistant concrete pillars which curve towards the inside of the camp. There are two fences about three metres apart all the way around the camp and they were electrified. About three metres on inside of the fences is a wire running along small posts at knee height and scattered along this wire at regular intervals are wooden signs with a skull and crossbones and the words “Halt - Stoj” written on them. This wire virtually made the two high fences unnecessary as any prisoners seen crossing it would immediately be shot from the guard towers.
Inside the fence there are around 30 identical three story brick buildings, which are all still intact. They are rectangular in shape, a little narrower than a basketball court and about twice as long. They’re set in three rows of ten.
The entire complex is about the size of a high school. In between the buildings are roads that were probably originally paved with brick, but are now uneven and mostly made up of dirt and gravel.
On the Eastern side of the camp there is a building built into a small hill. It has a chimney, and inside there are four cremation ovens and an empty concrete-lined windowless room with small holes in the ceiling.
Inside most of the thirty buildings there are now museum exhibits, dedicated to the various facets of the camps, from living conditions in one building, to extermination in another. There are photos and artefacts from the camps, and large text boards in Polish, English and Hebrew. On the second floor of the extermination exhibit there is a glass case filled with two tonnes of human hair.
We spent around an hour and a half inside the camp before leaving to get the free shuttle bus to the second camp.
Auschwitz II - Birkenau is three kilometres from Auschwitz I. It is close to the size of the town of Oswichim itself. If Auschiwitz I is the size of a high school then Birkenau is the size of two universities.
The bus drops you off at a large gatehouse a little way away from the nearest houses or businesses. The brick gatehouse looks a little like the 30 buildings in Auschwitz I, though it’s only one story. Through the large gate in the centre of the building runs a railway track. On each side of the gatehouse runs a fence identical to the one in Auschwitz I, with guard towers every couple of hundred metres.
Once you walk through the gatehouse (no reception building here) you enter an enormous field. There are almost no buildings here, just fences and chimneys. During the war, the sheds were made of wood, which have since disappeared, leaving only the chimneys at either end.
The railway line splits into three just inside the gatehouse and the three tracks run off into the distance. There is roads in between each of the tracks.
On each side of the tracks there is another fence, and on the other side of the fence there is chimneys as far as the eye can see. A few of the wooden sheds near the gatehouse have been rebuilt by the museum. Nearly a kilometre away from the gatehouse the tracks rejoin into one and comes to an end. Here there is an enormous memorial to the dead of Auschwitz.
On either side of the memorial there are the remnants of two ruined brick buildings. Another kilometre further along to the right there are two more of these brick ruins. Inside these buildings during the war were gas chambers, made up to look like shower blocks, and crematoriums. In 1944 a prisoner revolt burned down one of the buildings, and the other three were detonated by the SS as the war was coming to an end.
We walked constantly for an hour and a half and still didn’t see even half of the camp. At the end of the war, another section of it was under construction. Had the war gone on longer, it may have grown even more.
If you are confused by anything I’ve described here, I encourage you to find out more about it. The only thought worse than knowing what happened here is the thought that anyone doesn’t know what happened here.
On the memorial at the end of the tracks is written in many languages:
FOR EVER LET THIS PLACE BE
A CRY OF DESPAIR
AND A WARNING TO HUMANITY
WHERE THE NAZIS MURDERED
ABOUT ONE AND A HALF MILLION
MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN
MAINLY JEWS
FROM VARIOUS COUNTRIES
OF EUROPE.
AUSCHWITZ - BIRKENAU
1940 - 1945
