Poland. Nazi Death Camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau
Most memorials are created and/or maintained to honor and remember significant events, noteworthy people, or extraordinary achievements. A few others preserve places so that future generations will never forget a tragedy and the people who were impacted. Located in southern Poland, Auschwitz-Birkenau is a monument to unimaginable suffering and cruelty of the Holocaust. At this place more than 1.3 million humans, mostly Jews, were systematically murdered between 1942 and 1944.
Although it is sometimes thought of as a single place, “Auschwitz” refers to a complex of more than 40 concentration and extermination camps in southern Poland that were operated by Nazi Germany. The three largest were Auschwitz I located in the Oświęcim, the nearby Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp that served the I.G. Farben Corporation. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, a former Polish military facility became Auschwitz I. In the camp’s first two years it was used for holding Polish prisoners of war. Auschwitz-Birkenau is located about three kilometers southeast of Auschwitz I. Construction began in 1941 and between 1942 and 1944, trains delivered almost one million Jews to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. New detainees deemed unfit to work were murdered in gas chambers immediately after they arrived while those judged to be capable of work were housed in overcrowded barracks. In addition to Jews, the population at Auschwitz-Birkenau included 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war. Along with systematic killing with gas, prisoners died from disease, starvation, exhaustion, medical experiments, and through individual executions. Before the site was liberated by the Soviets in 1945, many prisoners died in forced marches to other camps. Prior to their departure, SS guards destroyed the gas chambers, crematoria, and other evidence of Nazi autocracies. In 1947 the Polish government approved a state memorial to preserve concentration and extermination camps and in 1979, Auschwitz became a World Heritage Site. Today, the site preserves 57 buildings associated with Auschwitz I and 98 buildings that were part of Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
It took about an hour to drive from Kraków to the Polish town of Oświęcim. After receiving an orientation, we began our tour of Auschwitz I’s neatly arranged barracks surrounded by barbed wire and guard houses. Above the camp’s main entrance is a sign that reads “Arbeit macht frei” (work makes you free). Near the notorious Block 11 building we were shown a brick wall where prisoners were routinely shot. Inside buildings were piles of suitcases, some with the name of their owners still written on the outside. Elsewhere were stacks of shoes, eyeglasses, human hair, and cans that held Zylon B tablets used for gassing prisoners. Guides pointed out the house where camp commandant Rudolph Hoss lived, and the gallows erected after his trial where he was executed. Inside another building was a reconstruction of a crematoria oven used at Auschwitz I.
In comparison to the crowded arrangement of buildings at Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau was more spread out. Following some railroad tracks, we passed through the camp entrance building. Beyond the entrance, the tracks form a “Y” with one set of rails continuing past barracks buildings to the gas chambers and crematoria on the far side of the camp. To the left of the “Y” is a preserved latrine building. When complete, Auschwitz II-Birkenau had 174 barracks that each measured 35.5 meters by 11 meters and housed 500 prisoners. While most are represented only by foundations, a few of the barracks still stand. Living in severely overcrowded conditions, each prisoner had about a square meter of space to sleep and store belongings. The prisoners worked and slept in the same ragged clothing. I tried to imagine dealing with insects, the smell of human feces, and the unbearably hot summers and chillingly cold winters.
On the west side of camp are the remains of underground gas chambers and crematoria. New arrivals who could not work were separated and sent to “the showers,” presumably to be deloused. In a dressing room they were told to remove their clothes before entering a large shower room with nozzles on the ceiling that resembled shower heads. Up to 2,000 prisoners were packed in before the doors were sealed and Zyklon B pellets were dumped through overhead vents. Most prisoners were dead within 15 minutes. Jewish prisoners called sonderkommandos would then transport the dead to the crematoria to be incinerated. Ashes of the dead were dumped into a nearby pond.
It’s difficult to leave Auschwitz-Birkenau without feeling that the experience has changed you. This horrible place symbolizes the limits of human-on-human depravity and brutality. Most important, it is an indelible monument to remind future generations that what happened in this place could happen again.
