The overnight snow turned the countryside into a winter wonderland but even a blizzard couldn’t disguise the horror of Auschwitz. It was – and shall remain always – a bit of hell on earth. No one should desire to visit Auschwitz. Everyone should be required to visit Auschwitz.
Nightmare in barbed wire
Auschwitz, Oświęcim in Polish, originally was a concentration camp to detain Poles and later for Soviet prisoners of war. It soon became the main SS extermination camp where Jewish men, women and children from several Nazi-occupied nations were tortured, executed, worked to death and murdered in gas chambers, along with thousands of Poles and Romas. The exact number murdered is unknown but the total is in excess of 1.2 million, equal to the annual number of visitors today.
The bone-chilling cold seeped through the brick walls of the housing blocks and through our fleece jackets. It must have been brutal for the inmates in mid-winter. Their thin, striped cotton uniforms were designed to cover their wasting bodies, not to provide protection. The buildings were virtually unheated and the prisoners, sleeping eight to a bunk, had only a thin cloth blanket.
We wandered on the muddy streets behind electrified barbed wire, visiting the quarters where the inmates lived out their own personal nightmares, into the cells where the recalcitrant were tortured and into the “death block” where executions were held. The Jews were told they were being resettled to be farm and factory workers so they went along placidly, carrying all that they valued with them. Once in the camp the Nazis confiscated all of their belongings and stored it for distribution to the German populace. There are rooms filled with pots and pans, prosthetics and braces, luggage and tons of human hair. But the most distressing was the room full of children’s shoes.
Children's shoes
Many traveled for days or even a week from their homes, crowded into unheated freight cars with no seats or sanitation facilities. The lucky ones, weakened by life in the ghetto, died on route to Auschwitz. Upon arrival the “survivors” were unloaded and lined up for “selection.” Those deemed fit for hard labor were tattooed with an identification number on their arm and marched off. The camp commander warned them that the only way out of Auschwitz was “up the chimney of the crematorium.” Those not selected, women, children, the infirm and elderly, were often escorted to the delousing area where they were stripped and their hair was cut off. Next came the “showers,” where they were murdered en masse with Cyclon B poison gas. Gold teeth were pulled from the corpses before they were removed to the crematoriums or to open pits for burning.
Tattoos, unique to Auschwitz
Birkenau, a German-engineeered death camp
Despite the numbers who died there, Auschwitz was more of a prototype for extermination camps to come. It’s sister camp, Birkenau or Auschwitz-II, was the epitome of a German engineered death camp, exponentially more “efficient” than Auschwitz-I. Its 425 acres of barbed wire, railway sidings, platforms, barracks, gallows, gas chambers and crematoria bears witness to one of the greatest crimes ever committed against humanity. It is also a monument to the human spirit of those who resisted the unimaginable and survived. Never again!
