Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkeneau

18 May 2012

Auschwitz I

Auschwitz I was quite touristy which really prevented me from being able to experience what the camp was.  I found it hard to connect with the camp in an authentic way.

Most of the buildings in Auschwitz I are original, because they were not bombed by the Allies.  However the barracks were not built by the Nazis, and were instead part of a previous camp that the Nazis used when they got to and started using Auschwitz I. 

You’ll notice that I keep referring to it as Auschwitz I.  That is the camp with the “Arbeitet Macht Frei” (“work makes you free”).  This sign was actually stolen a couple years ago, so now the sign is no longer original. When the “final solution” got into full swing, they Nazis created “Auschwitz II (Birkenau)” or Auschwitz Birkenau.  This is a separate camp, very close (just a couple kilometers) from Auschwitz I.  I’ll get to that in a minute.

A few of the barracks in Auschwitz I are now used to display artifacts from victims of the camps.  One room is full of suitcases.  You may wonder why they had suitcases if they were just being sent to camps where they were stripped of everything and usually killed within minutes of arrival.  When the victims were told to pack their things to move to deportation centers (like ghettos) they were told to label their belongings clearly.  This was part of the psychological trickery which was used to maintain a relative calm and coerce the victims. 

Another room is filled with the shoes of children.  Another room is filled with adult shoes, on both the left and right side.  We were walking through a room surrounded by shoes of dead mothers and fathers who were killed for being Jewish.

The most emotional room was a room of hair.  After the victims were stripped and sent into the gas chambers (which they were told were showers), they would then shave their heads.  They were already dead; there was no reason to shave their heads.  It was done to further degrade them.  Jewish culture places a great deal of value on hair; forcibly cutting or shaving it is complete humiliation and degradation.  There were four tons of hair in this room.  It is being preserved there, behind the glass (because it is contaminated with zyklon B), where it will eventually decintigrate.

This is a bad photo because I was far away, but here's a map of the city and the two camps it contains.  You see here how insanely huge Auschwitz II-Birkeneau is. 

Auschwitz II (Birkenau).

Auschwitz Birkenau was an extermination camp.  I knew that it was large but I had no idea of the true scale. Walking up to it (we walked the walk that the victims would usually have to walk, along the train tracks and into the camp), I was amazed and horrified at the sheer size of this place.  It went on so disgustingly far both left and right, and when I got inside, it went back just as far.  Poland is an incredibly flat area (as flat as central Florida), so when standing in the middle of the camp, you really can’t see either end of it. 

When learning about the holocaust usually you hear that most women and children were selected to be immediately sent to gas chambers.  This isn’t historically accurate.  Dr. Mengele, who among other disgusting things, was one of the primary people in charge of pointing his thumb to either the right or left to determine prisoners’ fate upon arrival to AB.  This is what largely determined the selection process: how many prisoners they needed for slave labor that day.  If that day there was, say, 87 people needed, the strongest/healthiest 87 were spared, and most of the others were immediately sent to the gas chambers.  They would ask the young boys their age when they came in.  Many times prisoners would pass by and tell the line of new child arrivals to lie about their age.  Sometimes those kids took the advice, sometimes they didn’t – and that alone determined many individuals’ fate. 

It’s crazy to think that how long after you arrived at the camp was determined on so many unsure, ‘luck-driven’, coincidental, and arbitrary (in the case of Dr Mengele) decisions. 

The current estimate is that by liberation on January 27,1945, approximately 1.3 million individuals were killed in Auschwitz II-Birkeneau.  About 90 percent of them were Jewish. 

A couple last notable facts:

1.  There’s an area they informally called “Canada” in AB.  It was named that by the prisoners, because they saw Canada as a place of fortune and abundance, and this assignment was one of the luckiest you could get in AB.  Here, the prisoners were charged with going through the clothes and suitcases of those who were immediately killed upon arrival, to collect any valuables, which would be turned into the SS, and then sent back to Germany on the trains that had brought victims to the camp in the first place.  Think about how valuable this job was for these people.  Every two inch scrap of fabric was like finding gold – men could lay it on their heads in place of the yamaka (only women got caps at camps – that was intentional [women don’t wear head coverings in Judaism]).  Or it could be used to wipe your face of sweat – there was no water to wash with, and people found humanity in simply pretending to wash their armpits with their bare hands.  If you had fabric to do it with, imagine how much more real it would feel.  Perhaps the most beneficial aspect of working at Canada was finding the occasional piece of food in victims’ belongings, giving you a few calories more for that day.

2.  Other measures were taken similar to the body washing that I mentioned before, in order for prisoners to restore some millimeter of normality and redemption back into their lives.  As prisoners, one’s saliva production was incredibly scarce, because of the lack of nutrients and water and the constant labor.  That’s one aspect I’d never thought about before.  We heard the story of one woman who would lick her thumb and index finger and use the tiny bit of saliva to run down her pants in order to create somewhat of a crease in them.  To make it hold, she would then sleep on them.  It’s amazing the things these amazing individuals thought to do to make themselves feel human again. 

It was in the barracks of Auschwitz-Birkeneau where our two survivors, Henry and Sally, shared their stories with us.  They both spent time here at the camp - it's where Sally's mother and little brother were killed in gas chambers, and where Henry spent years before being one of 87 children spared by the evil Dr Mengele.  But I will share their stories with you later. 

Well, I’ve gone on long enough (well.. can you ever actually go on long enough about this?), and I truly truly appreciate all of you who made it to the end of this.  It’s respect for those 11 million who suffered in somewhat similar ways.  Stay tuned for more (shorter) posts from the rest of my trip in the coming days.  

A display of some of the suitcases from victims at Auschwitz (I or II, I'm not sure - probably some of both).  It's about 2 or 3 times as long of a display case as it looks here.  I spared you the eyeglasses and kids shoes displays.

This is the side of one of the buildings at Auschwitz I, the windows of which were boarded up on the side facing the torture area.  People were hung by their arms like in medieval times from these poles (pictured in front), and shot against the brick wall in the back.  Obviously the other prisoners would hear these things, but couldn't see them.