Auschwitz.
I blogged a little bit of my experience there when I returned to the hostel in Krakow. At the time, though, I was still reeling from the sheer emotion of the place. If you read the post, it probably sounded like I was relatively unaffected. I talked about the weather and the logistics, but I never really said how it made me feel. There's a reason for that. A word of advice: don't go to a concentration camp the day before your trip ends. It took a great deal of effort to maintain that intellectual facade until I actually had time to process what I had seen.
This is probably one of the few posts that I will do containing a soundtrack. This is the music that was in my head while I walked the grounds of Birkenau and Auschwitz. The songs are from Schindler's List and The Pianist.
We started at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS, referred to Birkenau as the place of the "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe." Birkenau was constructed for the specific purpose of easing the burden on Auschwitz I, mainly through the means of extermination. 1.1 million people died in the camp, 90 percent of them Jews.
Looking in from the outside.
I think one of the most surprising things about Birkenau was just how few people we saw there. This was compounded when we went to Auschwitz I and encountered the hundred other people in our tour group. Honestly, it was almost a blessing. It's hard enough to think about what happened there - I really didn't need a ton of other people observing my sorrow.
On the other side of the wall. Most of the people who came through those gates never left - even when they were dead.
Looking back at the entrance from about halfway. The camp was divided between men and women, separated by the tracks.
Part of the remains of Crematorium II. There were eventually four crematoriums at Birkenau. They were demolished by the Nazis before the camp was liberated by the Soviets.
There are several of these pools around the crematoriums. I mentioned before that most prisoners didn't get to leave even when they were dead. Ashes were dumped in these pools, in the river behind the camp or were used as fertilizer for the surrounding fields.
There is a memorial between two of the crematoriums. It is a monument dedicated to everyone who lost their lives. Each stone represents a country that Jews were deported from to Auschwitz.
Part of the sewage plant. At one point, there were more than 90,000 prisoners at Birkenau. There were plans in place to expand the camp. Had the war continued, or the Germans won, it is impossible to determine how many more people would have been murdered.
Off in the distance, you can see the camp entrance. One of the reasons fewer people visit Birkenau is that so little of the camp has been preserved. Well, at least in some people's opinions. Most of the barracks were wood buildings, and many have collapsed. They've rebuilt some of them, but the fireplaces are all that exist of the rest. The crematoriums were also destroyed, and the only other thing still standing is the shower building. Still, I spent two hours there, and it wasn't nearly enough to grasp the scale of everything.
The barracks were designed to hold 52 horses. Instead, they housed up to 400 prisoners.
After Birkenau, we went to Auschwitz I, the original camp. Auschwitz was actually three main camps, including Auschwitz III-Monowitz. Monowitz was a labor camp primarily for IG Farben, but none of the buildings exist today. There were also 45 satellite camps connected to Auschwitz.
The main gate at Auschwitz. Arbeit Macht Frei: Work Makes You Free. When prisoners were first sent to the camp, they believed that maxim. This is not the original sign. You may recall that the original was stolen last year and cut into three parts. It has been recovered, but will likely never be put back over the gate.
The camp was originally a Polish army barracks.
Auschwitz started as a place to put political dissidents, mostly Polish prisoners and Soviet POWs. Gradually, more and more 'undesirables' were sent there, including gypsies and Jews. There were five other extermination camps, all in Poland, but most of the deported Jews were sent first to Auschwitz. They came literally from all over Europe.
In one of the buildings, there was a model of a crematorium. I'm not going to post the pictures of it. One of my constant internal battles was over whether or not to take pictures. On the one hand, it felt wrong to take pictures, like I was allowing evil to perpetuate. On the other hand, evil does perpetuate if men are not made to see what it leads to. People need to know what happened. The Holocaust was real. I came to the conclusion that it would be more wrong to give in to my personal discomfort than to let my pictures speak truth.
I'm going to tell you now, though. It only gets worse from here.
These cannisters held Zyklon B. Each one was used in the gas chambers.
There were two places where we were not allowed to take pictures. The first was in another room of this building. I was curious - everything we saw was horrifying, so what could be even worse that we were asked not to photograph it. The answer nearly made me vomit. The room was probably fifteen feet by seventy-five feet. I don't want to know how deep.
It was filled with human hair.
The Nazis had told the Jews that they were being relocated. So when the people were sent to Auschwitz, they brought their lives with them. And the Nazis stole everything. There is a room full of suitcases. A room full of toothbrushes. A room full of pots and pans. A room full of shoes. And a room full of hair.
The second place we weren't allowed to take pictures was the basement of Building 11. This was the building where the 'trials' would take place. It was also the building where people were tortured. Just because. There are three types of rooms in the basement: Standing cells, where four men would be placed in a square foot of space overnight with no recourse but to stand; Starvation cells, where prisoners were given neither food nor water until they died; and Dark cells, airtight rooms where prisoners were kept until they used up all the oxygen in the room.
I didn't want to take pictures of any of those.
Right next to Building 11 was the Death Wall. Once their trial was over, prisoners were taken to the wall, told to kneel, and then shot in the back of the head. Thousands were executed at this wall.
Thousands more were killed here. This crematorium was built as a test - it is the model for the crematoriums that were built at Birkenau, though those were larger. It is essentially three rooms. In the first, people were stripped and told that they would have a shower. In the second, they were gassed. In most cases, it took less than fifteen minutes. In the third, their bodies were stuffed into furnaces and burned.
I hesitated here more than anywhere when taking the photo. Death permeates the walls. It doesn't take much imagination to hear the cries of the thousands of terrified people who were murdered so efficiently. Ghostly fingers scrabble at your skin, pulling your hair, each touch demanding justice. Each silenced voice begs for the chance to make himself known.
By the time I reached this point, I was feeling very unChristian. Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz, was hanged on these gallows on April 16, 1947. They are right next to the crematorium. I was reminded a little of how I felt when I heard Osama bin Laden had been killed. I have to confess, though, that I felt no remorse at all over the death of Höss. His house was maybe 200 feet from the chimneys of the crematorium. At Nuremberg, he bragged that he had killed 3 million Jews. No. I felt no remorse for him.
I felt guilty. How does something like this happen? How do so many people look the other way? How do you reach a point where genocide seems like a viable option?
Oddly enough, the only question I never asked was why? I never asked God how He could let something like this happen. I know the answer. God didn't put those people there. God gave His Son for them. But He didn't just die for the prisoners. He died for the SS. Do you know how hard it is to accept that? We tell ourselves all the time that there is no difference between a big sin and a little one. But we don't believe it. We look at our lives, and we tell ourselves, "Well at least I never killed someone. At least I didn't steal. At least I didn't rape."
And yet... I see a place like Auschwitz, and I realize just how little it would take to actually reach that point. All of those people who lived near the camps, who told the Allies they had no idea what was happening less than a mile away... We are those people. We live next door to sin. We like to party with sin on the weekend. We like to dip our toe in, just to see what the fuss is all about. But at least we don't go all the way.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
An important post. Thank you.
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