The concentration camps of Auschwitz

27 July

Note: This post is pretty depressing. Don't read on if you're not prepared for it.


I think this will be the only post I make that only covers one day. I think the subject matter deserves it.

Just over a week earlier, in Berlin, I spent quite a lot of time exploring the darker side of the city's history. Places like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Topography of Terror Exhibition, the remnants of the Berlin Wall. Visiting Auschwitz was a very moving complement to those experiences, one that I felt I needed to do, and wanted to do, despite knowing that it would not be a particularly enjoyable day.

Leaving early from my hostel in Katowice, I caught a train to the town of Oświęcim. Oświęcim is the name of the Polish village from which the Germans named the largest concentration camp in World War II - Auschwitz is simply a Germanisation of Oświęcim.

The train was a bit difficult to find - it left from a small back platform of the train station and was only one carriage. Most people take buses from Kraków. Unfortunately that also meant the site was hard to find from the train station. I was headed first for the site of the camp known as Auschwitz I, the original camp set up in an early stage of the war. The massive Auschwitz II-Birkenhau site, nearby, was built later and was much larger, including being in the process of enlargement when the camp was abandoned by retreating Nazis.

Auschwitz I

There was quite a sombre mood from the people heading into the museum located at Auschwitz I. Walking out of the entrance building - previously used by the Nazis for administration - the (in)famous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign is right there, and suddenly the overwelming magnitude of where I was and what had happened there kinda hit me.

Arbeit Macht Frei - "Work Makes You Free" - possibly the most depressingly ironic sign in the world

It all seems unreal when you're standing there. On such a hot, sunny, fine day, the fact that any of the atrocities that happened there - or anywhere else during World War II - could have ever happened seemed completely hard to believe. Entering into the rows of barracks that formed the camp, if you stopped paying attention to where you were, you might think you'd walked down a slightly boringly constructed street.

Some of the barracks in Auschwitz I - what looks like quite a nondescript street, with trees, and the sun shining, was home to some of the worst atrocities in World War II. That's pretty hard to comprehend. 

Until you look down the end of the row of buildings, to the guard tower, barbed wire and sign. That reminds you where you are pretty quickly.

The barracks now house a variety of exhibitions on the events that happened out there, representing living conditions at the camp, for example. Most buildings have photographs of prisoners - those for whom a record exists - lining every corridor, with their arrival date and date of death (when known). There were just more and more of these photos in every building, every one of them looking like any other normal person, young and old, male and female. Seeing them one by one, around every corner, only begins to hint at the extent of the number of people murdered here.

One of the most well known (and photographed) is the building containing a collection of items recovered at the site.

Collection of tins taken from Auschwitz I prisoners

Briefcases taken from Auschwitz prisoners

Block 10, towards the end of one row, was the camp hospital. Oh, and it was also used for human "medical experiments".

Block 11, beside it, was an administration building where sentences were passed against prisoners who caused trouble. There are cells beneath the building where one of the punishments involved a tiny cell, about one square metre with a small door below knee height, where up to four (yes, 4) people would be forced to stand for long periods, unable to turn around or sit down.

Standing cell for up to 4 prisoners who required some sort of punishment

Or, if the commander in charge of administering the punishment decided they needed something stronger, he could send them through the door out into the courtyard between blocks 10 and 11 to the "Death Wall", where they would be summarily shot.

That just made me shake my head in wonder and disbelief.

After walking through some of the other exhibits - a number of the countries whose population was affected the most have their own exhibits, and I visited the Dutch and Russian ones - I walked out of the row of barracks - through this double barbed wire fence:

The fence around the barracks - though it didn't used to be able to be possible to walk through

And, looking past the gallows where camp commander Rudolf Höss was hanged in 1947, was this building.

The first gassing chamber at Auschwitz (partially reconstructed). The chimney is for the in-build incinerator.

Suddenly I was very alone - no other tour groups around for a moment. And, all alone, I walked inside that building.

It was haunting, it was quiet, it was dark, it was scary. It was completely overwhelming.

I lasted about 30 seconds until I had to leave, out into the fresh air. I couldn't stand it any more.

I was time for some relief from this place. I left the Auschwitz I camp and treated myself to some time of normality, away from the thoughts and memories of that place. Some deep breaths, some lunch. And then I headed off in the shuttle bus to the other site, the much larger Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau

Birkenau was, as I mentioned above, a much larger camp built primarily to assist with the Nazi's "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". This was where the majority of the estimated 1 million Jews murdered at Auschwitz were taken - about one-sixth of all Jews murdered in World War II. Many others were taken here and murdered too.

The large majority of those came straight in a train - the tracks were eventually extended to go right into the camp - down a ramp, and straight into a gas chambers.

This is the site I'm talking about, a very well-known image:

The very symbolic "Gate of Death" entrance to Birkenau, the train tracks leading directly inside
(image borrowed from Wikipedia) 

The Birkenau site is, quite simply, huge. It stretches on for 171 ha. Many of the buildings were destroyed by retreating Nazis in an attempt to cover up their crimes from the advancing Soviet army. Some still remain, but large expanses of grass fields are now all that is left of much of the barracks area.

The barbed wire fence is all the remains in the back reaches of the fields at Birkenau

Of the buildings still standing, it was possible to view the insides of a barracks to gain an insight into the sleeping conditions.

Those platforms ("beds") would sleep up to 5 or 6 people. The building would be heated through one pitiful fire in the centre during the harsh Polish winters, and would be sweltering hot during the Polish summers.

I walked down towards the rear of the camp, sweltering in the hot sun. Having drunk several litres of water and still being hot and thirsty, it was somewhat possible to envisage how hard forced work would have been during the summer - for those "lucky few" who were deemed fit to work and not sent directly to be gassed.

The train lines extend through the length of the site, directly to almost the front doorstep of the four massive gas chambers built for just one purpose - the extermination of the Jewish people, the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".

The end of the railway lines, looking down the platforms were new arrivals were sorted into those fit to work, and those to be sent directly to the gas chambers

These chambers were capable of killing - and cremating - up to 12,000 people every day at their peak. All four are in ruins - three blown up by the Nazis on the imminent arrival of the Soviet army, and one that was damaged beyond repair by a uprising of some of the Sonderkommando, prisoners who had the grim task of removing corpses from the gas chambers and cremating them.

Prisoners would enter down a set of stairs into a room where they would be told to undress in preparation for disinfection. They would then enter the "disinfection room" - complete with fake shower heads - with an estimated up to 2,500 people being crammed into the 210 m² space at once.

The entrance to one of the gas chambers, where several hundred thousand people would have seen their last light of day

The ruins of one of the gas chambers

I sat down to think about it, try and take it all in.

Over the space of several years, some one million people were murdered within 200 m of where I was sitting. Their ashes were strewn in the surrounding areas.

How was that possible? How could anyone have let this happen? How could anyone have denied the basic human right to live to anybody? How did the Final Solution to the Jewish Question manage to become so far progressed?

As I walked past the nearby memorial, I couldn't come up with an answer to any of those questions.

For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half men, women and children, mainly Jews, from various countries of Europe.
Auschwitz-Birkenau
1940 - 1945

The train trip back to Katowice was sombre. As someone put it to me, it was fortunate to be travelling not just to, but also away from Auschwitz on a train.

I couldn't help but think that the warning to humanity referred to on the plaque will not be heeded forever. I could feel the cry of despair.