A VISIT TO AUSCHWITZ

​My first impression was that it was too pretty to have been a concentration camp. With well-spaced buildings, brick siding, tiled roofs, tall windows, and healthy trees, it wasn’t far different in appearance from the college I attended (photo #1).
 
What I had entered into was Auschwitz I, which existed from after WWI and was a Polish army barracks when Poland was invaded in 1939. The Germans first used it to keep POWs but quickly evolved it to look like the Dachau Concentration Camp, Himmler’s standard.
 
In 1941, a newer and much larger facility was built to compliment the original and to provide faster mass executions; see the map in photo #2. It is called Auschwitz II (also referred to as Birkenau, after a nearby village) and provides the more iconic view that most people are familiar with (photo #3), and has the large capacity crematoria.
 
The third part of the complex is Auschwitz III (also referred to as Monowitz, after another nearby village), which was built in late 1942. Monowitz is much smaller than the other two and was built to house prisoners who worked as slave labor at the large IG Farben chemical plant across the street.
 
Within 2 miles of each other, Auschwitz I and II receive about two million visitors a year; Auschwitz III was as close, but was destroyed at the end of the war; it’s not part of the tours.
 
My tour in September of 2022 was led by a resident guide using a microphone, while we wore earpieces. With maybe thirty on-hand during the day, each guide goes through several weeks of training to learn and follow a common script, meaning that except for answering questions, my group heard the same information as everyone else.
 
After going through metal detectors at the entrance, it took 45 minutes or so to tour Auschwitz I, transfer by bus to Auschwitz II, spend an hour or so there, walk through the museum, and then end the tour with a short visit to the bookstore. Several locations visited by the tour did not allow photography, out of reverence for the prisoners.
 
I did go through a crematorium, saw the execution wall where prisoners were routinely shot, peeked through the window of a genuine prison cell used for political prisoners, and saw the nice two-story house of Rudolf Hoss, his wife, and children. He was the commandant of Auschwitz, and was hung in 1947 from the same gallows that his prisoners had been hung. What would it have been like to grow up with a window that looked out on a concentration camp?
 
Every 27th of January is the International Holocaust Day, recognizing the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army on January 27, 1945. Last year on this date, I wrote about the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, hosted on January 20, 1942, by Reinhard Heydrich, that formalized the operational aspects of the extermination of the Jewish Race in Europe. In particular, six prison camps were recognized as those that would be reconfigured or built new as “Death Camps”. Those six camps would have the joint capability to kill as many as 25,000 Jews a day.
 
Auschwitz was selected as one of those six and that’s why Auschwitz II was built. Unlike Treblinka, another Death Camp, which had a few barracks (Jews stepped off the trains and were herded directly into gas chambers, which meant there was no need for a lot of housing), Auschwitz not only routinely brought in by train those who would be killed (photo #4) but also had a significant worker population to help build the camp, operate the camp, and to provide workers to the various projects and factories building war-related products. Auschwitz-Birkenau would eventually have more than a hundred barracks that would house 300,000 prisoners during the three years that it was active.
 
Seeing the preserved barracks and the vast number of foundations of destroyed barracks was the most gripping part of the tour for me (photo #5). Between 1940 and 1945, about 1.3 million Jews, Poles, Roma/Gypsies, Soviet POWs, Italians, French, Scandinavians, and others were brought to the camp, while 1.1 million of those were executed, the majority in the gas chambers. No matter how many came, there was always room for more.
 
I appreciated the model of the crematorium. Photo #6 gives the layout. Photo #7 is where the people arriving on the trains were directed into an underground room where they disrobed, hung their clothes on pegs, and sometimes found soap to use in the showers.
 
Expecting to shower and be deloused, they went into a large room that had shower heads installed in the ceiling. Once the gas pellets were dumped into the rooms, it took ten to twenty minutes for everyone to die from poisoning (photo #8).
 
The next photo is the room with the ovens. Bodies were brought up from the underground chambers and burnt, sometimes four-to-five bodies in each oven (photo #9). There were at least two of these facilities.
 
These buildings were destroyed by the Germans as they fled the camp in the face of the approaching Soviet Army. All that remains today are large piles of bricks and steel.
 
I’ve read about the various work assignments that prisoners were forced to perform: gathering the clothes, personal items, and the suitcases left by the people in the undressing room; cleaning the dressing room so the next crowd of people would not be suspicious; pulling out the bodies after they had been gassed (800 or so piled five deep on top of each other); searching each body for gold teeth, coins, hidden gems, and other valuables, cutting and collecting women’s hair; taking the bodies upstairs to be cremated; operating the ovens; and periodically taking the ashes out to be dumped.
 
I cannot imagine the horrors they must have seen. 

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