(Tychy, Poland)

On September 9, we went to the Auschwitz concentration camps from World War II.  Auschwitz is the German name for the Polish town of Oświęcim; the town still exists a short distance from the camps.  We visited the two main sites:  Auschwitz I and the much larger Auschwitz II (Birkenau). There was also a smaller Auschwitz III and some satellite camps nearby.

This was a very difficult experience.  At first it looks almost pastoral and the barbed wire isn’t even that conspicuous.  But once the story starts rolling, you quickly get a very sick feeling in your stomach.  The feeling doesn’t let up either:  as bad as Auschwitz I was, Auschwitz II-Birkenau took the horror to an even higher level.

The Nazis cleared out all local residents in an area of 40 square kilometers around the camps.  This made it possible to carry on atrocities without local knowledge.  There was all kinds of misinformation:  the sign above the entrance to Auschwitz I says Arbeit macht frei, which can be translated as “work will set you free”.  This was only the beginning of the massive deception.

It is impossible to capture the overwhelming evil in a single blog posting and I am concerned that this brief narrative will not paint a complete picture.  However, I still think it is important to describe some of what I saw.

80% of people who arrived at Auschwitz (primarily Jews, but also including other groups who were unacceptable to the Nazis) by train were immediately sent to “showers”…which turned out to gas chambers that would kill them within minutes of entering.  They had no idea what was coming:  people brought their most valuable possessions to the camp and expected to be getting a job the next day.  The remainder were put to hard labour without sufficient food and most died a horrible death through starvation, disease, medical experiments or execution.

It is estimated that 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz.  The actual number is impossible to confirm because so many were killed upon arrival.  During mid-1944, at Auschwitz alone, the Nazis were killing in excess of 5,000 people every single day.  The sites were designed for utmost efficiency:  the gas chambers were right beside the crematoria.

We actually walked through the gas chambers and crematorium at Auschwitz I where thousands and thousands of people were murdered.   It is very difficult to put into words what it felt like to be in that place.  If you can imagine the most haunted building and the most sickening feeling you can remember, and then wonder what could possibly have motivated people to be so evil and commit such heinous acts of mass murder…that combination would begin to describe what we all felt.

Auschwitz was not the only concentration camp.  When you include the other Nazi camps, the numbers (it is estimated that 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis) are even more incomprehensible.  It was a continent-wide assembly line of death.

We walked by some “inventories”:   huge displays of property confiscated from the camp residents that had not yet been put to use by the Nazis by 1945.  The sheer volume was astonishing but the worst was the hair:  the Nazis sheared the residents and used all of the hair to make garments and other “knits”.  We saw a display case that was about 40 metres long, several metres high and several metres deep…still filled with human hair that had not yet been converted to another use before the camp was finally liberated.

We also saw the main “receiving centre” at Birkenau (see photo at the top of this posting).  Here, new arrivals by train would be assessed in a split second by a Nazi doctor.  If he pointed left (which happened almost all of the time, especially if you were a child, female, elderly, or disabled), you would be dead that day.  If he pointed right, you were deemed fit for labour…but you would almost certainly die within weeks or months.  Death could come from starvation, execution, gassing, disease, or even the rats who infested the lower bunks.

There is so much more that could be said.  So much humiliation and inhumanity…and that was for those who survived the initial culling.  In addition, the survivors would smell the furnaces from the crematoria that were burning each and every day.  I won’t discuss the medical experiments that were performed on the camp residents.  I think the only thing that saved me from being physically ill was the fact that we did not see the video that most people watch upon arrival at Auschwitz.  It contains footage taken by the Red Army when Auschwitz was liberated in early 1945.  I have seen snippets of this footage in the past and the condition of the surviving prisoners is extremely disturbing.

If you have the opportunity to visit a concentration camp like Auschwitz, you should give it serious consideration even though it is by no means “enjoyable”.  It will have a profound effect on you and it will be impossible to view the world in quite the same way afterwards.