Coming to this part of the world, it was important to me to see Auschwitz. Getting tickets was more difficult than I imagined. If you ever get the chance, go ahead and book your tickets the day after booking your plane ticket to ensure entry. During summer months, you must book ahead, and according to the website, you must sign up as part of a tour. But there were a variety of choices multiple times each hour throughout the day. I would choose one (a random selection), then about three days later, receive an email that that option was not available. That was it, nothing about what was available. After several tries, I became panicked and called in a favor to a friend who works at the Holocaust museum in DC. Thankfully, he came through for us, and I’m eternally grateful. Tickets are free. It was important to the Polish government that the museum be an education center and wanted it to be accessible to all. We were not part of a tour, of which I was actually grateful. Jessica and I spent a full five hours at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and had they not been going through a heat wave, I believe we easily could have stayed longer. Rick Steve’s has very helpful notes. Information plaques were written in Polish, English and Hebrew. I’m confident that we missed out on some unique tidbits of information, but I was very glad we could move at our own pace.
I woke up this morning, anxious. Yes, part of it was certainly our unairconditioned room, but I believe just as much was anticipation for the day. Excited certainly wasn’t the right word, nor thrilled, nor eager. All of these words include a touch of cheer, and that is not a word you can use to describe Auschwitz. I was anxious about how I’d feel throughout the day, interested to learn more and emotional.
Upon entering, you walk through the same gate that thousands of others walked through bearing the German translation of “work will set you free,” a complete and utter lie. Although today with healthy trees, clean brick buildings, soft grass and wide walkways, the compound could make you feel like you’ve arrived at some sort of retreat center. It masks the hell that once was. This was never meant to be a work camp. It was intended as a death camp.
In 1940, the Germans opened Auschwitz because the local prisons were overflowing with Polish prisoners. Poland held the largest Jewish population in Europe. Keep in mind that Hitler’s pure hatred of the Jews was central to his plans, but there were many more “crimes,” that would get you placed into concentration camps as indicated by the symbol sewn onto the prisoners’ uniforms. There was also the room with piles of crutches and prosthetics, a reminder that Hitler’s first victims were the disabled.
The camp is set up in an orderly way with three rows of barracks evenly spaced. Each barrack had a different purpose. Many were for housing inmates on crowded floors or three bunks high with multiple people sharing a bunk. One was the hospital (where no one came back out of). And one was the death block. Inside many of these buildings today are well described and vividly pictured memorials of the unimaginable crimes that happened here. There were incredibly few photos taken inside the camp during its operation, as the Germans did not want anyone to see what was going on inside. Most displays are photos of people boarding the train to Auschwitz, a few of the survivors after being liberated, many drawings done by those few who survived, and a few photographs taken by arrogant SS officers proud of their deeds.
One block displayed many of the confiscated items that the prisoners had brought with them. Prisoners had been encouraged to bring things with them. Those that were put into gas chambers were told to leave their clothes on a numbered hook and remember what number they were for “when they returned”. All vindictive measures made to make people at first feel more comfortable. There was a room full of suitcases with names scrawled on the side identifying just some of the over one million people slaughtered here. There were mounds of shoes, peppered with shoes the size of a young toddler. Glasses, family photographs, combs, pots and pans, were all on display in great numbers. When the camp was in operation, these items would be sent off to large warehouses called the Canadas, because the prisoners doing the sorting pictured that to be a faraway country with lots of wealth.
When Auschwitz first opened, each arriving prisoner, after being showered, shaved, tattooed with a number and given a uniform, was photographed. One building was lined with photographs of people who had died in the camp. Most, who weren’t murdered immediately, only survived the malnutrition and unimaginable conditions for a couple months. I must admit that I was shocked by the organization of the Nazis. If the true intention was just to slaughter in large masses, they kept a lot of records. They knew when specific prisoners (numbers of course, no longer a name) died, and kept logs. Roll calls were frequent, due to ensuring no runaways, and so constant keep of the lists of live prisoners was crucial.
One exhibit focused on the starvation of the prisoners. Given only the meagerest of rations each day and forced to work at often break-necking jobs, prisoners often died of starvation. Photographs showed women, whom after four months of intense treatment after liberation still weighed half of what they had before arrival at Auschwitz.
Dr. Josef Mengele, a sadistic man, used many prisoners for gruesome experiments. He especially enjoyed tormenting twins, hoping to find ways to increase fertility for German women. As such, his experiments also included reproductive organs of men and women. Not seeing the people before him as people, but only research subjects, he gave no thought to their well being.
The death block was a horrific example of the terrors imposed on prisoners. Some “criminals” were “tried” very quickly and with no opportunity for speaking for themselves. No one went into the death block and returned. Some cells were for starvation where prisoners were locked away for two weeks at a time. Some were forced to stand in tiny cells with other prisoners for days. There was a dark cell where only a tiny shaft of light appeared. If it was snowy outside, the shaft closed and the prisoners were left with no air. If prisoners didn’t die in these hells, they were taken outside to the courtyard just outside, the execution courtyard where they were shot.
Some of the barracks were created and maintained by individual countries that had lost citizens at Auschwitz. We chose two to go into: the Netherlands and one just for the Jewish victims. For the Dutch Jews, I had a hard time understanding as the first few walls were about how welcoming the Netherlands had been to the Jews, and then something happened, and they were segregated, shunned and treated as second class citizens. How can this happen in a place? How can people allow this to happen? Is it just fear, in this case of Nazi Germany, that can cause people to look at others as if they aren’t people at all? In the end, over seventy five percent of the Jews living in the Netherlands had been murdered by the end of the Holocaust. This wall shows the name of the 57,000 of them that were killed at Auschwitz.
The National Memoral to Jewish victims was haunting and poignant. Upon entering, a somber prayer was being sung in Hebrew, setting the mood. A dark room showed video clips of Jews from across Europe in the 1930s enjoying life and living a seemingly normal life. Another room gave maps and statistics of the Jews killed in the Holocaust, 6,000,000, nearly two thirds of the Jews that had been living in Europe.
Don’t let Denmark’s low number miss your attention. Denmark is known to have worked together, as a country, to hide and deport the 8,000 Jews living there, in just a few short days. The stories from that country are truly inspiring.
Another room showed video clips, translated into several languages of Hitler’s hateful speeches, government officials and officers proudly making horrifying, bold statements with crowds cheering. How truly terrfiying the see that crowd mentality. It is not acceptable for us to cheer at leaders who are uttering words of hate. Ever.
The last room was a giant book with page after page filled with names of Jews lost in the Holocaust, still being added to as descendants put pieces together.
The creamatorium, the real hell amongst hells is still in tact. We walked inside, although, I couldn’t stay long. The heartbreak that this building caused is tangible as if the weight of the souls remains. The first room is where people were told to undress. The next chamber is the “shower room,” where seven hundred people’s lives could be sucked away from them in one short moment. Just next door, furnaces were ready to cremate the bodies. It was here the prisoners were also forced to work, often coming across bodies of their loved ones as they were supposed to toss them into the fire.
Just outside, the gallows remain in tact. Not ones where prisoners had been killed, those have long since been destroyed, but where the camp commander was hanged. Soon after the war, he was tried and convicted. Survivors asked for him to be executed at Auschwitz, a small inkling of justice.
Unfortunately, that isn’t even half the story. The Germans wanted to be able to house more prisoners than the crowded barracks at Auschwitz would hold, so they constructed a second death camp about two miles away, Birkenau. Birkenau, much of which was wooden, and since destroyed is a huge expanse. Despite the fact that very little remains, the enormity of the space, and the chimney stacks that dot the terrain, is truly haunting. It was built to hold 200,000 people, and four crematoriums here could each slaughter over 4,000 lives a day.
A lone train car stands on the tracks that run through the camp as a reminder of the selection process where families were divided. Here, prisoners were stripped of their names and given only a number. A Nazi doctor, with little consideration, and a simple flick of the wrist to the right or left chose if arriving prisoners were sent immediately to the gas chamber or were allowed to live in hell for just a little bit longer.
One building housed photographs sent in by family members after the war. It helped to humanize the victims and remind us all that they were human beings just as you and I, but they were denied the right to live. Photographs of family outings, vacations, clubs, proud moments, and every thing else that seems to make our lives brighter lined the wall. One wall was even divided into family sections where large expanses of extended families were represented. The plaque describing what professions the family members held, who married whom, and the children they had, often ended with “and only one family member survived.”
It was a heart wrenching day, one where it was difficult to find hope. But even in times so dark, it would seem you couldn’t see right in front of you, there were glimmers of hope. Love letters had been found on the walls in the “Death Block,” telling family members to go on, to have strength and to pass on the victim’s love to his/her children. There were many stories of the solidarity that prisoners showed. In a time when everyone could have been selfish simply for the chance to live and tried to savor every crumb of extra or contrabanded ration, they did all that they could to share, keeping their fellow prisoners alive for a little bit longer. The soldiers did what they could to divide the prisoners such as punishing groups for the action of one. If one ran away, ten were tortured, and yet the stories that came out weren’t of bitterness, but instead pride and hope for their fellow man. One such story was about a priest. When one of his bunk mates ran away, ten from the barrack were forced into the starvation cell. He was not in the ten chosen, but volunteered to take the place of a man with small children. Two weeks later, when the starvation cell was opened again, the priest remained alive. Inspiration spread through the camp, but of course that was squashed by the SS who soon slaughtered the priest.
I believe that one of my biggest take aways was how, with such enormity this operation continued for so long without anyone doing anything. There was even evidence in the museum of Polish officials (in hiding in other countries) sending letters to officials in other countries asking for help. One such letter had a response from the British that seemed to point mostly toward economic relations with the Germans as a reason not to act. My hope is that most countries did not know the extent, or could not fathom it, how could anyone truly imagine these horrific acts. But still. How did such massive slaughterings occur with so many countries turning a blind eye?
With this being one of my biggest take aways, I realized we must all do something. When we see wrong, even if we can’t “fix” it, we can’t turn a blind eye. We have to speak up. We have to do what we can to make sure that our fellow human beings are treated as human beings. Learn from our past, make our future better, and ensure that hells, like the one that encompassed this part of Europe less than a century ago never happens again.
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions." - Primo Levi, survivor of Auschwitz
No comments:
Post a Comment