Krakow & Auschwitz

I have made it to Krakow safe and sound although I think I have come down with a bit of a cold. Probably just from the quick changes in climate the past week or so, or Jules gave me her sniffles.

I met up with Shelley at the hostel last night, and we went out for a late bite to eat, and spent the evening catching up. She is having a wonderful time in London studying but her theatre trip to Krakow has been a little reorganized due to the fact that all the shows she wanted to see here have been sold out. Oops.

We decided today to get up early and take the tour offered by the hostel of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. What a moving experience. Per the request of the museum I did not take any pictures inside Auschwitz, and I really didn't want any pictures documenting what I saw there or me being there. The memory will be enough to serve me for the rest of my life without revisiting the sights I saw.

After an hour and a half bus ride, we were dropped off in front of Auschwitz I, the first camp in Auschwitz out of the three that were completed before the liberation in 1945. It was eerie how modern it felt in Auschwitz I, brick buildings that reminded me of many apartment complexes I have seen in the States. But you quickly remember the horrors that occurred here not that long ago. The first building we were guided through showed the construction of Auschwitz and several photocopies of some of the few remaining Nazi records about Auschwitz. First the camp was built for Polish criminals but a year after its completion was turned into a Jewish work and execution camp. You wander through these buildings on the tour where hundreds of Jews struggled to survive and most often died. We were taken to barracks that still held the original beds where Jews were forced to sleep two to a bed in something half as wide as a twin bed, three tiers high, in good conditions. It was just absolute insanity to me what I was seeing, a place where the innocent were brutally tortured and killed. It may be the first time I actually understood what the word genocide meant.

The most impacting barrack contained relics of the Jews that had been in Auschwitz. The Nazis had warehouses the prisoners referred to as "Canada" where all of the personal items taken from people were sorted and kept. Anything of value was taken by the Nazis to help the funding of the third reich. Now the artifacts remain as proof and memory of the people that were once contained in Auschwitz. In one room they had two tons of hair piled up on display. Braids, single strands, and ponytails filled a massive room incased in glass. My jaw was on the floor and the tour guide pointed out that this was only the hair from about 45,000 people. The approximate weight of the hair from all 1.5 million people executed at Auschwitz would total 67 tons. It will hit you in the gut. Other rooms displayed thousands of glasses stacked together, hundreds of thousands of shoes, luggage, bowls, and many other artifacts that once belonged to the people imprisoned at Auschwitz. Room after room filled with items collected off people after they were sent to the gas chamber.

When the Jews would arrive by train to the camp, they had been promised they were being taken to a better place where they could start a new life. Propaganda was the Nazis greatest tool, but for the Jews it seemed better for them to simply believe the propaganda than believe the stories of what was actually going on. Once on the platform at Auschwitz, SS doctors would sort the people into two groups, ones who looked healthy enough for work and those whom they believed weak. The weak group was led off to take a "shower." Told to strip down, remember where they left their belongings so they could retrieve them later, and rushed into a gas chamber decorated with fake shower heads hanging from the ceiling. These people had no idea what was going on. Lie after Lie.

We walked through the "prison inside a prison" at Auschwitz, Barrack 10. A place where people were sent to be "punished" and judged by the Gestapo. The basement was filled with cells used to starve, suffocate, and cripple men. No one ever left Barrack 10 alive. I can't even explain the feeling you get when walking through a place like that, seeing the etchings in the walls left by men trapped inside.

Finally in Auschwitz I, we were led to the only remaining gas chamber. (All other gas chambers and incinerators were destroyed by the Germans). It was devastating to be forced into this room in a line of tourists, stepping into the room that was the last stop for tens of thousands of people, many of whom had no idea what their outcome would be. They were just going for a much needed shower. It was appalling to see how close the Gestapo's home was to the chamber. A place where he raised a family and kept a garden for his wife. Prisoners could hear his children playing in their front yard as they stripped naked before entering the Zyklon B filled chamber. It was terrifying.

After Auschwitz I, we were taken to Brikenau, the largest of the three camps under the heading of Auschwitz. All of the barracks here were constructed of wood planks by the prisoners themselves. Today very few of the hundreds of barracks in Birkenau still stand, but as you look out over the expansive field, you see grass littered with still standing chimneys of where each barrack once stood. When the area was repopulated after the liberation, people would go to the unprotected camp and steal the wood from the barracks to construct their homes. Many of the homes standing in near by areas are built out of the concentration camp.

That was the thing I struggled the most with internally, the idea of working to preserve this place. In one spot there were actually construction workers re-roofing one of the barracks. At first I was disturbed by the idea of maintaining Auschwitz. But that is when I realized in order to honor the memory of the people that were held in this sick place, you have to remember the terrible acts committed against them by the Germans. It was just such a weird concept to me, "rebuilding" Auschwitz.

Needless to say, Shelley and I were exhausted after our visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, so we had a bit of lunch afterwards, walked around, and had some riveting political and social debates. It will definitely be an experience I will never forget.