Nazi Auschwitz & Birkenau

No matter what you think you know about the history of World War II and the atrocities that occurred under Nazi Germany, you really haven’t got the full picture, and the full understanding of it, until you have made a visit to the Auschwitz Concentration Camps, near Krakow, Poland. For a backpacker heading through this region, it is something of a rite of passage, a must do tick on the list. And you will walk out of there with your heart crushed by the sadness and the despair, and an anger that people could be so cruel and allow this to happen.

There are two camps, the first of which your guided tour visits is the original camp that was an old Polish army barracks, converted to house tens of thousands of war prisoners and undesirables. The famous gate which states Arbeit macht frei meaning “work makes you free” was back in place after being stolen by opportunistic thieves one night about 6 months ago. The buggers just rocked up in the middle of the night, cut the sign into three pieces and went off with it. There are some interesting stories on the Internet about why they stole it, and conspiracy theories about a neo-nazi black market for collectors of this kind of stuff. Anyway, you can Google that if you want to know more.

But basically, you walk through the gate to be confronted witha complex of brick buildings, probably numbering about 40, most of them are the same and they were for the most part converted into prison blocks. The darker side of the camp is revealed when your guide explains what happened in the various buildings.

The dozens of prison blocks were constantly overcrowded and filthy, and each one had been converted into a museum space outlining the horrors of the Nazi occupation of Poland and especially their prejudice against the Jews, Gypsies and other undesirable races. In one block, they show heaped piles of belongings that were taken from the Jews that were brought into the Auschwit/Birkenau camps and murdered. There are huge piles of hair, suitcases with names on them, an entire room full of shoes, clothing and accessories. The photographs of prisoner profiles on the wall show faces with fear spread across it, and the gap between the date of imprisonment and date of death was often only a few months at most. Once in camp, you didn’t have long to live; you were either executed on arrival, or forced to work until you were too weak to work, and then you died of starvation or some other cause.

The there was the execution yard, and you get to see the brick wall where thousands of prisoners were marched up to, and shot dead. Next to that are the whipping posts, and around the corner an area where mass hangings were held. Across the road is a ‘hospital’ building but nobody ever went there to get better. Prisoners who lived long enough at the camp did so because they were able to work, and if they were injured they tried to hide it lest they be sent to the hospital. It would not be long before a prisoner who was unfit to work, would soon be dead. Near the hospital is the ward where ghastly medical experiments were carried out, generally resulting in death or infertility in some horrific manner. And we also saw the tiny prison cellar in Block 11, one of the most famous blocks, because this was next to the execution yard, and basically there were cells there for various prisoners. Some were sentenced to be starved to death and held in dark underground cells. Other cells were for prisoners that were awaiting execution. The worst ones were the ‘standing cells’ and I think these were the most horrifying, because you would have to crawl through a small trapdoor in a wall, and you would be in a tiny room no wider than 1m x 1m. You could stand there only – with three other prisoners in the same space – in complete darkness, unable to sit or lie down.

And of course there was the gas chamber and crematorium. And it’s a haunting experience to walk inside a room where you know that tens of thousands of people were murdered by poisonous Cyclone B gas. But then, just when the tour of the first camp ends, you jump onto a bus and are taken to Auschwitz II, about 3km away. And the horror that you have just witnessed is fully realised when you lay your eyes upon the facility that was specifically constructed by Henrich Himmler as a ‘solution to the Jewish problem’.

The second camp is possibly about 8-10 times bigger than the original and unlike the former which was a converted army baracks, this was specifically constructed for the purpose of exterminating Jews. The scene from Schindler’s List comes to mind… and it is now a realisation that such atrocities did happen and you are standing on ground where over 1.5 million Jewish people were killed. Trainload after trainload of Jews were brought to the camp between 1943-45, after being forcibly evicted and removed from their homes and cities. Once transported through the entrance archway, they would most likely never leave. The Jews were unloaded onto a long concrete station platform and hurded into lines. A Nazi doctor on duty would basically take one look at each person and with the nod or shake of his head, seal the fate of every new arrival. Those who looked fit enough to do work or labour were sent either left or right (depending on whether you were a man or woman, as the camp buildings were separated) but the vast majority were sent directly to one of four enormous gas chamber and crematorium buildings at the end of the platform. They were immediately put to death by gas, and the ‘labourer prisoner Jews’ had the job of clearing the bodies and cremating the remains – after stripping the bodies of everything from clothing, hair, gold fillings and artificial limbs. The same prisoners were forced to go through the suitcases and separate the clothing and belongings into piles, which were reused elsewhere and sold to make money to fund the war.

The size of the camp is enormous; from the entrance and stretching out to both left and right, are hundreds of wooden prisoner buildings. The train line which bought so many Jews to their deaths, stretches for 1 kilometre into the camp, ending at the gas chambers and crematoriums. It took us a couple of hours to walk a small part of the camp and look around. One building had hundreds of latrines – concrete slabs with round holes cut into them, so close to each other that you’d be squashed up sitting to the next person either side of you when you needed to go to the dunny. The bunkhouses showed sturdily constructed bunks – good you think at first, then you find out that on average 3-4 people shared a bunk.

A thunderstorm loomed in the distance, adding gloom to the afternoon, as we finished our tour at the memorial to the holocaust victims. A message is displayed on large plaques – the same message but in dozens of different languages of the world. The message was both a solemn tribute and a warning, and I don’t think it could have been put any better…

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

I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll never forget this experience, and it makes you realise the stupidity of doing things like the ‘Hitler salute’ in public in Germany, or wearing a Nazi outfit to a fancy dress party. The things we do when we are young and stupid… or perhaps the things we do when we just don’t appreciate the affect these things can have on other people, especially since this is still modern history and there are people in the world that lived through these years alive still.

At the end of the tour, I fell into a discussion with two British ladies and we were discussing what we thought of the camp and the tour. I had to say that it was awesome – of course not awesome in a good-times way, but you get what I mean. The only question that lingered unanswered, was ‘how did the German people let this happen’? I couldn’t understand.

One of the ladies told me a story about how the German race is one that needs to be ‘led’. And they did all this following orders, or doing what they believed they were doing was for the greater good. Even after the war, the Germans needed decisive leadership, though this didn’t gel with me completely. I mean, 1.5 million people killed under their noses? Even if the Nazis had established a 40km exclusion/buffer zone around the camp areas (which they did) to stop the general public from knowing what was going on, still, surely they must have known that things weren’t right in their own backyard?

Anyway, it is a different Germany that I visit today. They are open and honest about what happened in Germany during the world wars, and there is only one thing they don’t like to talk about – Adolf Hitler himself. I explained once that he was a taboo subject, even to the point that the ground on which Hitler’s Berlin bunker was located, is now paved over and turned into a carpark for a nearby convenience store, with but the smallest plaque acknowledging it’s existence ‘around here, once upon a time’.

I hope that both the Germans – and the whole World for that matter – have grown up enough now, and with the advanced in communications technology such as the Internet, increased travel, tourism and international relations, that this situation should never be allowed to repeat itself again.

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