This past weekend, Heidi and I travelled to Poland to stay with Colleen and Sarah and make a day trip to Auschwitz.
Spending part of a day at a concentration/extermination camp is something I have felt called to do since I have been in Europe. I have read the stories - Anne Frank's, Elie Wiesel's, and many others, and I have felt a need to see and to understand even a small part of what these people experienced. In a way, seeing helps us to remember - and when we remember, we can work so that horrors like the Holocaust do not happen again.
In the early 1940s, Hitler occupied most of Poland. During his conquest, he took over a group of Polish army barracks in Oswiecim and created a concentration camp for Jews and political enemies now known in the English-speaking world as Auschwitz. In just three years, 1.1 million people were exterminated within the barbed wire fences of this place. 960,000 of these people were Jewish.
Our tour began in front of the gate of the main camp. The entrance proudly boasts the message: "Arbeit Macht Frei" which means "Work sets you free."
Unfortunately, as our guide told us, the only path to freedom from Auschwitz was death.
Inside the gate, we were told that a small orchestra of musicians would station themselves for practice every morning and every evening. While the orchestra played, the prisoners would line themselves up in rows of five for counting. The Nazis watched as they walked through the gates of Auschwitz for work at rock quarries and in factories. Because there must be the same number of people coming home as there were leaving, the prisoners were required to carry back the bodies of the people who collapsed and died from exhaustion while working. If the number of people walking back through the gates at the end of the day did not match the morning numbers, the Nazis would choose at random a number of prisoners to publicly torture to death.
Our first stop in the camp was Block 4, a small nondescript brick building that looked like the rest of brick buildings in its row. This block featured extermination exhibits. On the first floor, we learned that the Nazis told their prisoners that they would be housed at Auschwitz, a transition camp, until they could be relocated to a new place. Upstairs, we saw a disturbing model of the selection process and crematorium.
When people arrived at Auschwitz, they often arrived after anywhere from two to ten days of travel. Up to one hundred people would be stuffed like sardines into a train car typically used for cattle. Many died of suffocation and starvation before they even set foot on Auschwitz. Those who survived would be released from the trains and asked to line up in two groups: men and women/children. At this point, Nazi doctors would look over each of the people and select who would die and who would work. With a jerk of the head, many of the doctors sent people straight to the extermination showers. In Block 4, we saw how the people were led into a huge warehouse basement and asked to strip for washing. The Nazis encouraged people to hang their clothes on numbered hooks --- they did this in order to prevent panic and give the people the sense that they would be coming back for their belongings. The prisoners were herded from the changing rooms into the showers. Once everyone inside, the doors to the showers would shut. Within a minute, a poisonous gas called Zyklon-B would be released from the shower heads, and within twenty minutes up to 20,000 people would be dead. The Nazis forced work-prisoners to pillage the bodies --- often, they shaved the hair off the corpse and mined for the gold in their teeth. Then, the work-prisoners would stack the bodies into elevators for the crematorium once the gas cleared from the chamber. These workers were also systematically killed every two months to insure the secrecy of their cruelty. To think about how clinically, how efficiently the Nazis exterminated mass groups of people still gives me chills.
In Block 5, we saw the physical remains of the people who died. Because their bodies were burned and their ashes were spread into fields to be fertilizer, the only things that are left of many Holocaust victims are their physical possessions which the Nazis took from them upon arrival at Auschwitz. We walked from room to room in Block 5 and saw tangled messes of broken eyeglasses with bent frames, one ton of shoes and two tons of hair - some of which was still tied in braids. My stomach turned when I saw a single greyed baby booty sticking out of a stack of shoes.
Not all of Auschwitz's prisoners died upon arrival at camp. Some prisoners were selected for work. We saw the exhibits featuring the torurted lives of these prisoners in Block 6. Work prisoners were slept on narrow bunk beds - often with three or four other people. They were give no blanket and no pillow. Because Poland is very cold for five months out of the year - and these buildings had no heat - many died from the cold. The prisoners were fed 1/2 a liter of coffee for breakfast, a bowl of vegetable soup for lunch and a piece of bread for dinner. The food rations the people were given make it clear that Auschwitz work prisoners were also condemned to death. No one could surivive an eleven hour shift for long on that diet. The prisoners wore thin striped uniforms and wooden shoes - neither of which protected them from the snow in the winter.
Upon arrival to Auschwitz as a work prisoner, everyone was labeled with a number and a symbol. The number became your identity. The symbol placed you into a group for counting. Auschwitz is the only concentration camp that tattooed these numbers onto people, so if you have ever met or seen a Holocaust survivor with a tattoo, you know that he or she survived Auschwitz and not another camp such as Dachau or Buchenwald.
In Block 6, we also saw how the smallest work prisoners lived. Children made up 20% of the prisoner population at Auschwitz at any given time. Most of the children served as lab rats for medical experiments. The Nazis were particularly interested in testing and examining twins and triplets. I learned this weekend that much of the information we have about people's tolerances of hypothermia, heat stroke, pain, and torture comes from Nazi experiments. In the medical world today, there is a debate on the ethical use of this information. Some people say that because this information was gained through unauthorized, de-humanizing testing, we should not use it. The documents and information should be burned. Others say, that, while the information was gained barbarically, we should use the information to help others and to honor the victims' memories.
From Block 6, we travelled to Block 11, also called the "Death Block." No prisoner who entered Block 11 survived. We saw the many different extermination methods the Nazi killers employed: starvation cells, standing cells, small gas chambers, dark cells.
In one particular cell, our guide pointed out the crucifix of Jesus one prisoner scratched into the wall with his nails before he died.
Our last stop at Auschwitz I was the gas chamber. Because the images of the baby booty and scalped braids were still making my stomach roll, I decided not to go into "the showers." I did not want to imagine the panic and hysteria of the crowds when the doors of the chambers shut and the gas was released. I did not want to walk where so many people had died.
Auschwitz I was a much smaller version of Auschwitz II/Birkenau. While Auschwitz I housed 14,000 prisoners at any given time, Birkenau was build to hold 100,000. Auschwitz horror was magnified at Birkenau.
By the end of our tour, my heart ached and my stomach hurt.
And I prayed, and will continue to pray asking God to "Deliver us from evil."
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