13...Auschwitz / Birkenau

I've decided that all I can really do is tell what I observed by the photos I took, and a few words to explain. I can't do more. The enormity of what happened there at these twin camps is not to be comprehended....and yet it must be, so that we can ensure it never happens again. Not by looking back and bewailing the past, but by creating a future where it is entirely unthinkable that human beings should act this way ever again.

The gate that leads to the original camp..."Arbeit macht frei"..."Work makes one free"

The original brick built barracks in Auschwitz, conditions here were better than in the wooden huts in Birkenau. The barracks had originally been built for the Polish Army before being taken over by the Germans, initially to house Polish political prisoners (all the intellectual, political and religious leaders of Poland at the time the Nazis invaded).

Having been told that they were being moved to "the East" to work, people brought posessions with them in bags and suitcases (one of these is labelled M.Frank, Holland, possibly belonging to Margot, sister of Anne)

 Everything was taken from them, most was sent to Germany for the second hand market, what ever didn't go there was stored. Shoes, both for adults and children...

....Glasses, toothbrushes, plates and cutlery...if it was brought in peoples luggage then it was stored. As were items removed from the dead. there is a room in which there is a mass of human hair, tons of it, destined for use as fabric.

Once stripped of posessions, those few who survived the selection process and were chosen for work were issued with their camp uniform (the odd marks in the photo are reflections in the glass behind which the clothes are displayed)

Men and women were kept in seperate barracks, with fences of barbed and electrified wire between them.

There were watchtowers at regular intervals around the perimeter....

...security was very tight, only around 180 people managed to escape from the camp, mostly from work details outside the walls. Those people selected for work were systematically brutalised and starved until they died. On average women and children lived 2 months after their selection for work, men around 4 to 5 months.

The vast majority of those people who passed through the gates of the camp...Jews, Homosexuals, Roma (eastern European ethnic Gypsies...the very same ones being expelled from France and Italy right now), Jehovahs Witnesses, Politicals.....did not get as far as the work parties. They were separated off and told that they needed to wash and be disinfected after their long train journey. Having removed their clothes they went quietly through this small doorway (just as we did on our way in, although we knew beforehand what we would see)...

...around 1000 people at a time crowded in to a small, dark cellar space....

..in the ceiling there were small openings....

..into which Zyklon B was poured, a crystalline form of Prussic acid, that released a gas which suffocated those people trapped in the chamber.

 It was the same stuff that the German soldiers used, in much lesser concentrations to disinfect and delouse their uniforms and living quarters.

It took some time for them all to die, and for the gas to be cleared out again. Then the Zonder Kommando (a work detail of prisoners) would clear the chamber and begin the process first of stripping each body of gold fillings, watches, jewllery, hair, prostheses, anything that might be of use, before burning the bodies in the specially designed incinerators.

This process was actually too slow and inefficient for the disposal of such vast numbers so that many thousands of corpses were burned on pyres in the surrounding forests. The smoke could be seen from 10km distance.

It became known in the area that the camp was not the work camp it was stated to be, but instead details began to filter through about it's true nature. By 1942 word had been sent to London and the forces fighting Germany about what was really going on at Auschwitz. It was a political decision that kept the camps going until the end of the war...the camps were not a military target, destroying them would not help defeat the Germans, and besides which...it was all probably exaggerated.





Auschwitz 2 otherwise known as Birkenau was opened because the original camp was too small to deal with the numbers of people being brought in from all over Europe. Prisoners came not just from Poland, Russia and Germany but from anywhere where the Germans had invaded...Italy and Greece. They came in railway trucks designed for cattle, some 80 to a truck...

On the platform they were immediadtly divided into those few who were to join work details, and those who were marched straight to the gas chambers (destroyed at Birkenau by Germans as the Russian armies drew closer)

Accomodation for the workers at Birkenau was in wooden barns, open in part to the elements, where people slept in bunks...

...around 20 people to each bed section....

Here at Birkenau there is much less of the structure left standing, just fields full of brich chimneys to show where the wooden huts stood, divided by lines of fencing...

At the end of the railway line that leads into the camp there is a monument to the millions who died in this place...

Yet the place is it's own monument. I asked my guide if she found her job difficult "Yes," she said, "Sometimes it is very hard, but I think also it is very important that we tell people about what happened here"
By preserving it, and by making it available to people to visit, by having guides who know the history, not only in terms of dates and events but of the people who passed through from life to death, this monument to the evil that Humans can do is there to help ensure "Never Again".