Auschwitz

The wrong bus that Luke and I hopped on ended up in Oscwiecim, which was quite fortunate as it was a place that we both had down as an essential for a trip to Europe. Better known by its German name, Auschwitz. Auschwitz is made up of three camps, of which we saw the main two, Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Seeing the massive military camp, semi-destroyed by the departing Nazis, was extremely intense. We wandered through the gates inscribed with the lie "Work brings freedom", and around the camp, looking at the corridors of electrified barbed wire through which the prisoners had to walk from their slave dorms to their work place. The group toilet with a long concrete slap with 100 bowls in it, each prisoner only given 2 minutes twice per day at a set time, no privacy and no water. For those who went to the toilet at any other time than that allowed - the punishment prison, a prison within a prison, a hellhole within a hellhole. There was the suffocation room where 35 prisoners were shoved inside and the door was sealed until they all asphyxiated. The standing room, where four prisoners were forced to stand in a 1m x 1m cubicle all night without sleeping, only to work again the next day (four days of this killed any prisoner). The starvation chambers.

Auschwitz was mostly a concentration camp, where the prisoners were worked to death. But it was also an eradication camp for a few years, until the high-throughput Birkenau camp was completed. Cattle trains of prisoners (first Polish political prisoners, then Jews, Roma, anti-social elements, Communists, etc) would turn up at the camp, where the Death Doctors decided which went to the concentration camp, and which to the eradication camp. The elderly, children and sick were mostly sent to the eradication camp, except for those to be experimented on (such as all twins). At the eradication camp the prisoners were stripped, shaved and gassed, before being cremated in industry-style furnaces. In both the eradication and concentration camps, over 1.5 million people were murdered, 90% of whom were Jews.

The most intense experience for me was the Canada warehouses (so called because in Nazi Germany Canada was an icon of wealth), where all the goods stolen from the prisoners were stored before being redistributed to Germans. The piles of baby clothes. A two tonne pile of women's hair, shaved from them before gassing (it was turned into textiles by German industry). I felt physically ill at this point.

For ever let this place be
a cry of despair
and a warning to humanity
where the Nazis murdered
about one and a half
million
men, women, and children
mainly jews
from various countries
of Europe
 
Auschwitz-Birkenau
1940-1945