The day dawned grey, frosty and just as somber as our destination today, the Auschwitz & Birkenau Concentration Camp an hours drive up the road from Krakow.
Rosie had to visit this site. She felt she owed it to the 1.3 million people who died here, in this camp, where the name alone is infamous and known worldwide.
Rosie has grown up with the stories from European Grandparents who have lived through the hardships of the war, on the border of Germany. Rosie has read the diary of Anne Frank, watched the black and white war movies, read accounts of this camp and stared in horror at the pictures of piles of emaciated naked corpses discovered after the liberation.
There has been no other site in the history of the world, where so much human death and suffering has occurred in such a small area and for so long. By walking through Auschwitz, along with the other 5,000 people that visit per day, Rosie feels it is her duty to bare witness and keep alive the memories and the gravity of this death camp and the murdered by walking the literal paths, in the footsteps of those that met their deaths here.
Rosie and The Operator traveled to Auschwitz on a 6 hour Day Tour with Krakow Direct. We were picked up from our accommodation and en route we watched a one hour film presentation of events leading up to the establishment of Auschwitz and Birkenhau in 1940.
Looking out of the window into the cold, bleak December landscape you can almost imagine what it would have been like for those arriving at the same destination, in cattle carts. Peering through the cracks at the same frosty landscape, seeing the very same trees and sparse farmsteads that Rosie is seeing now.
In the carpark, our group of 12 is absorbed into another couple of groups to make a conjoined tour party of about 35. We are each issued headsets and our guide whispers into a microphone which transmits to us silently and individually. The tour groups are spaced well apart and even though you can see at least a hundred or more people around the site…there is no noise….just reverent silence and the soft tones of our tour guide in our ear.
Stepping through the infamous gates of Auschwitz with its banner of ‘Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Sets you Free’ rimmed with steel and barbed wire, was totally surreal, our journey had started and the reality of the horrors started hitting home harder than any history books.
This portion of the camp, lined with avenues of brown brick buildings is known as Auschwitz 1. It was the first area to be built in 1940 and was used for Nazi admin and to house Polish political prisoners.
In a nutshell, the Nazis took over Poland because of its strategic position in Europe and wealth of resources. They kicked the Polish off their farms and out of their houses. The Nazis then gave the farms, houses and businesses to German families. If the Polish family was lucky, they could live in the barn and work for meager rations on their own confiscated farm. The dissenters and unlucky ones were sent to work in German factories or labored at Auschwitz.
Today these barracks are all part of the Museum complex which is on this site. The buildings contain original Nazi camp documents, photographs, and personal belongings of the Jewish prisoners.
Each building tells the story of the camp and is lined with pictures and information. This is now so much more than a story for Rosie, we are here, ground zero, these are facts, and they are chilling, heart rending and poignant.
By 1941 Auschwitz had become the biggest Jewish extermination camp in Europe. These are tins of Zyklon B, originally developed as a pesticide but were used to gas the Jews when they discovered that after the first 20,000 or so a bullet to the head of each and every person was too time consuming and costly. Each tin killed 150 people, this room was full of empty tins….from floor to ceiling.
The statistics keep coming. Approximately 1.3 million people were transported to the camp and 1.1 million were executed. 90% of this number were Jews. This hall was full of thousands of suitcases, everyone that came here was falsely promised by the Germans that they were going to be relocated, so everyone came with suitcases full of their most valuable and precious possessions. There was literally a mountain of suitcases, all named, waiting for their owners that never returned to collect them.
The Germans had prisoners sorting out the contents of the bags as well. Jewelry was kept and sold on, so were bundles of clothes, brushes and all cookware. This pile of enamel cookware was staggering, it was 6 feet deep and filled up another whole building. The Germans made millions from the sale of Jewish personal belongings, all funding the Nazi war machine. Below that is a pile of eyeglasses….not just a pile….a quarter of a room full….the quantity is staggering!
These are the shoes of the murdered…this stack too was 6 feet high and three meters deep. It ran the entire length of the building, 50 meters down one side and back up the other. 43,000 pairs were found in a warehouse on liberation day….and here they are.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, the next building held the most sobering and shameful evidence of German profiteering from the deaths of a million people. Bundles of shaven human hair, line both sides of a barracks, 50 metres long by 5 feet high. Ponytails still tied in their original ribbon, long pieces, short pieces, all blended and tangled together. The colours all faded and achingly similar after 70 years.
After liberation, 7 tonnes of human hair were found baled in the warehouses, ready for sale. The Germans sold the hair to be made into coat lining, socks and winter clothing, no money making resource was wasted here in Auschwitz by the Germans.
Rosie needed a moment, this was so overwhelming, right at the beginning of the tour. The quiet respectful tone of our guide was relaying this information with crystal clarity straight into Rosies ear as we somberly walked in single file through room after room of personal belongings and now corridor after corridor of the prison uniform clad dead.
The Germans photographically recorded the prisoners they exterminated at the beginning, until there were, well, just too many. Filing past their photos and looking into their eyes, some defiant, some resigned…some already dead and flat. Rosie felt she had to acknowledge every one of them as having been a living a breathing person. Rosie wanted to read all their names, occupations and see how long they lived here before their lives were taken…some a matter of days, some months, some years. But there were too many of them, way too many of them, lining the walls for as far as the eye could see. The shaven heads and same stripy uniforms all blended into one….which is sad, as each was an individual cruelly snuffed from the world.
What also blew Rosies mind was the worn steps we traversed through the museum on the course of our tour. You could see the stair treads, worn by soles of millions of visitors witnessing the atrocities of this camp. Crazy.
The wall at the end of Block 11 was known as The Death Wall, this is where the SS shot over 11,000 men, mainly Polish political prisoners. We walked out the door of the building along the back of the wall, into the crisp winter air, under the blue sky and within 5 steps we were standing in front of that wall and what would have been the firing squad.
So, so so much blood spilt, right where Rosie was standing. Today though, the ground at our feet was littered with flower petals from the bouquets that were left in remembrance in front of this wall.
7,000 members of the SS staffed this camp and only 12% of this number were ever convicted of war crimes.
Rudolf Hoss ran the camp – he lived on site with his wife and young family. The house they lived in was in sight of the crematorium pictured below. Hi wife is reported to ‘have loved living there and enjoyed her beautiful garden’. Hoss was caught after the war, convicted of war crimes and bought back to Auschwitz where he was executed by hanging on the grounds. He was asked if he had any regrets in his life, his answer, ‘not spending more time with his family’.
This was the first Auschwitz crematorium.
Four more were later built on the Birkenhau site across the road. They ran 24 hours a day and each factory of death cremated 2,000 people per day.
The fences around the camp were all electrified. Many of the weak starving and dying sacrificed themselves to the fence rather than await their fate.
The last, most poignant room of the tour contained The Book of Names, a 6.5 foot tall book containing the 4 million names of all the Holocaust victims from all of the death camps in Germany. This book contains the total equivalent of every man woman and child that lives in my country of New Zealand……exterminated, wiped out….eliminated from the face of this earth. A whole countries worth. The numbers are too enormous to comprehend. The size of the book….with the tiny lettering inside, is too enormous to comprehend.
This urn below holds the ashes of the last Jews that were cremated on the Auschwitz site. The ashes were taken from the crematorium where they were left after the liberation and stand today as a memorial.
Rosie and The Operator were mentally drained as our tour ended in Auschwitz, we were glad of the 30 minute break we had before we drove to the Birkenhau camp, about 10 mins away.
Birkenhau is not a museum, it is the wide open expanse that is still the same footprint as it was 74 years ago. It is more of a reminder and memorial of the past. This camp in the day was specifically built to swiftly and efficiently process and exterminate the captured. It only ever housed 100,000 of the million that arrived here.
The prisoners arrived in cattle carts by train from all over Europe. They were immediately processed on the platform.
Those over the age of 50, the weak, sick, infirm, children and those with children were automatically sent to the gas chambers. Those who passed the cull….were now used as slave labour for the Nazis. It was pretty sobering standing in that exact spot where so many millions fate was decided within seconds.
After stopping, pausing and reflecting at the point where the processing of the prisoners was held Rosie and the Operator walked the exact same road, in the footsteps of the prisoners destined for extermination.
So many tour groups were trekking this very road, everyone walked in silence, the only sound was the crunch of the footsteps. This was a long walk to the gas chambers and crematoriums, they are housed in the tree line you can see right at the back of the picture. Rosie can guarantee everyone walking that path today was thinking of those that had walked this path before us over 70 years ago.
The road is long, the sky was grey and clear, the air was cold and still, with every breath we exhaled a plume of white steam. The road was wide and raised with a deep ditch on each side. A multiple string, barbed wire , electrified fence ran the entire length of this road. Dark windowless watchtowers were positioned at regular intervals along the endless stretch.
At the end of the road lies the rubble that was the giant crematoriums. The Nazis tried to destroy all evidence of their existence just before the end of the war. The remains still lie where they fell today. Some of the prisoners barracks that were not destroyed by the Germans are in the background and the tall beautiful trees stand as witnesses as they did all those years ago.
Spanning between the four crematoriums is a memorial to the Holocaust, built in the area of the haphazard mass graves of the cremated and hastily buried. Every language in the world is represented here as a reminder to remember and honor all those who lost their lives, so we never repeat the mistakes of the past.
With most of the barracks being destroyed, the open ground of the camp contains the skeletal remains of row upon row of brick foundations with chimneys that never warmed the prisoners as the Nazis never gave out fuel.
The tales of the living conditions in the barracks are just more visions of horror and depravity. Overcrowding, cold winters, sweltering summers, disease, dirt, diarrhea, starvation and death.
The last room in the building contained an exhibit filled with family photos of the prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The photos were found on the grounds, probably taken from the suitcases of the prisioners, and it was a powerful way to wrap up an intense day. We have all seen photos of prisoners in concentration camps, identified only by numbers. This exhibition gave the prisoners back their original names and identities.
Our tour guide was amazing and so emotional, being Polish and having had family live and die through these gates herself. She retold the horrific history of this site twice a day….and has been doing it for years. She explained that it is her duty to keep the facts alive so this cannot and wont be repeated.
Walking through the camp and seeing the sheer size, seeing the industrialization of murder, seeing the fields where countless thousands were haphazardly and anonymously buried, will make this register deep down to your very bones. Rosie too, felt emotionally bereft and drained walking towards the gate home.
It was a long day as we all drove back to Krakow in silence as night fell. There was so much to take in and process. In New Zealand we bow our heads and say ‘Lest we Forget’.
Tomorrow we are off to visit the worlds oldest Salt Mine, a thirty minute drive out of Krakow.
