Auschwitz & Birkenau, Poland (2008)

Given that we had basically “finished” Krakow, we decided to head out to Auschwitz for a depressing day at the most well-known Nazi concentration death camp. We spent four hours there and at the Birkenau camp down the road, walking along the roads and in the buildings where over a million people had walked to their deaths. How is one supposed to emotionally understand these deaths? One feels sad at the death of a person, and at the death of two people, but are you supposed to feel a million times sadder at the death of a million people? What are you supposed to think when you see a room full of thousands of shoes that were removed before the owners were gassed? Or the room where children were sent to before they were all killed? Really, all you can try to understand were the logistics, dates, treaties, timings, geography, and politics of the situation. That is something one can wrap one’s head around, but the rest of the emotion is best commented on by psychologists, historians and poets.

The entrance to the concentration/death camp says, “Work brings freedom.”

Double electrified barbed wire fences were impossible to escape from.

The barracks.

This is known as “The Killing Wall.” The windows of the adjacent barracks were boarded up so that no one could see what they heard.

A crematorium.

The well-spaced quiet streets of Auschwitz.

Two more concentration/death camps were built near Auschwitz, including Birkenau, to handle the overflow of people from all over Europe coming in (but never coming out).

People arrived by train and were divided into those suitable for work and those who went straight to the gas chambers.

Another view, but from the guard’s tower overhead.

3 levels per bunk bed, 3 people per level.

Just before the Soviets liberated Birkenau, the Nazis tried to hide their atrocities by blowing up their gas chambers.

An old dried up pond where they used to dump the ashes from the cremated people.

George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”