Auschwitz

Once we stumbled off the train—tired, probably smelly—but we had arrived. Where? To a broken down train station in the small town of Oświęcim. We walked off onto the platform and into the station which had floor to ceiling paneled windows with doors in between. We couldn’t actually identify these doors though, especially since sprinklings of panels were broken through. No patience to walk to all the way to the doors I guess. But once we walked out into the street we realized that of course we were hungry and walked across to a small corner store. Using Ukrainian and a lot of gestures we got some rolls for about dirt-cheap and walked about 1.5 kilometers to the first Auschwitz camp. This was the first sight of English, well really any language other than Polish. We watched a movie to help us better understand the political tornado in Germany and how it affected the rest of Europe.

We collected our headphones and met up with a tour guide who went through the first camp as well as later took us to Auschwitz II (Birkenau). As one can imagine, the entire experience drowns the hope within the human spirit. We witnessed and learned about the experiments done on children, mostly twins. And were not even allowed into the building designated for these experiments. We saw the prison inside the first camp. Yes, a prison inside of a prison. There were meter by meter rooms were the SS would stuff up to TWELVE adults in at night and force them to work the next day. The most any person could last through such torture was twenty days.

The Birkenau was the most overwhelming of these camps. It held up to a 100,000 people and with its four gas chamber/crematoriums could destroy 5,000 people’s lives each, each day. The camp went on and on and on. We walked it for a couple of hours or so. It was incredible to hear about the intricacy to which the Germans made sure to camouflage the camps. Further, the guide, the posts, everything we saw, emphasized how a large chunk of the victims were actually not Jewish—but regular residents that the SS just deemed unworthy as humans. Soviets, political prisoners, intellectuals—whomever they felt like imprisoning.

Below are more pictures of the camp.Auschwitz I

About 2,000 people slept in one barrack. (Auschwitz II)

Four monuments stand in four languages. This pond is where the ashes of the hundreds of thousands of people murdered at the camp.

These utensils were found in one of the barracks nicknamed "Canada" by the victims. It was a storage facility of all of the victims possessions and Canada symbolized a freedom for which they longed.