Auschwitz-Birkenau

The Nazi concentration camp known as Auschwitz was actually divided into three main sub-facilities/camps: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz. Nothing remains of the Monowitz camp, but much still remains at the sites of Auschwitz I and Birkenau. I visited both and will thus divide my blog into two parts, one for each camp. Before I get to talking about the camps, I would like just give my general impressions of the entire camp.

First of all, I don’t know quite how to describe the experience of visiting such a place. People have asked me how my trip went and my general answer is that “it was good.” But I’m not sure that visiting a place where close to 1.5 million people were killed can be good. At the same time, it wasn’t a “bad” experience. This conflict of emotions made it difficult to understand exactly what I was feeling throughout the visit. Another factor in this had to be the weather. Going to a place that has such a dark place in history, you sort of have the expectation that a dark cloud will be hanging low over the entire compound. Instead the sun was shining all day and this seemed to lighten the mood a bit. This is one stark difference to my visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Obviously that visit takes place entirely inside and they have all the windows blacked out (as they would’ve been when she was hiding there); this darker interior sets the tone for a more a somber mood throughout.

Perhaps my visit to the Anne Frank House put a different spin on my visit to Auschwitz. As I’ve written before, quotes from her diary and other people adorn the walls of the museum. This made it very easy to identify with the struggles of her and her family during the war. One quote actually pointed out perfectly that Anne Frank’s Diary gave a face and a name to an atrocity that occurred on too big a scale to comprehend. When exploring the Auschwitz facilities, you see the structures and many of their interiors, but it’s harder to actually imagine the experience of the millions of people who came through there. I’m not trying to say that this in any way negatively impacted my visit, but it made the visit less emotional and powerful than I expected or experienced when visiting the Anne Frank House. That’s all.

Inside the facility of Auschwitz I, a floor of one of the buildings is dedicated to the people from the Netherlands that met their end at Auschwitz. It must have been built and decorated by the Dutch, because it has a very familiar feel to the Anne Frank House. There are even quotes on the wall, including a couple from Anne Frank. I took pictures of these to recreate what it was like inside the Anne Frank House. At least for me, seeing quotes from people who experienced this horrible war in person is much more powerful than just seeing a building. I will share a couple with you to show you what I mean.For me, that last quote is the most telling. To see the impact that the war had, that it was able to basically break the spirit of a 15 year-old girl, is truly heartbreaking. That is one example of why I found visiting her house to be a much more moving experience than visiting Auschwitz.

Auschwitz I

This was the first facility that the Nazis used as a Concentration Camp in the town of Oswiecim. It was a former Polish garrison that had been taken over after Poland’s defeat in 1939. In 1940 the first people to be brought to this camp and murdered were Poles. Later, Jews and other Nazi “undesirables” were sent to this camp as well. The people were basically prisoners who were also forced into slave labor to support the Nazi war effort. Many of the people at the camp were men, but there were also women and children. All were subject to horrible treatment including beatings, different forms of torture, and medical experiments. Of course, death was also an inevitable result of this treatment if it didn’t come from being worked to death first. Inside one of the buildings are pictures of the first Polish prisoners to be brought into the camp, including their date of internment and dates of death. Some died within days, most within months, but very few lasted more than a year. This is of course in stark contrast with what you see when you first enter the camp, a sign that reads “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or “work makes free.”There was no dearth of methods used by the Nazis to keep the prisoners from escaping. The camp is surrounded by two sets of electrified barb-wire fences standing three meters tall and in some places a third concrete wall with electrified barb wire at the top is also present. The third picture below displays an area located just inside the entrance. The black sign in the picture tells visitors that the Nazis used to hang prisoners at this spot who had been shot while attempting to escape as a reminder to the prisoners of the consequences of trying to do so. There also many signs warning prisoners of the same thing by displaying a skull and crossbones along with the words, “Halt! Stoj!”Inside the camp, there are rows of buildings that were used as barracks and various other facilities, such as administration buildings, a jail, and an infirmary. The living conditions of the barracks where the prisoners slept were miserable. Hundreds of people were forced to sleep on the floor of the same small room and had to share sparse bathroom facilities. The lack of sanitary living conditions led to the deaths of countless inmates at Auschwitz.There were also separate jail facilities within the camp (the jail is on the right in the first picture). The prison held those who had tried to escape or those suspected of participating in clandestine activities such as planning escapes, organizing mutinies, and maintaining contacts with the outside world. The living conditions inside this jail were even worse than in the normal barracks. Here prisoners were interrogated and then usually sentenced to death in a number of different ways, including: by firing squad at the so-called “death wall” (the second picture), starvation, or even suffocation. Suffocation was carried out by stuffing up to 39 prisoners into a tiny cell in the basement of the facility that had only a small opening (about 3”x3”) for ventilation. Most prisoners died from a lack of oxygen. Also in the basement were three “standing cells” used to punish prisoners (the fourth and fifth pictures). Up to four prisoners at a time were made to crawl through the opening at the bottom and then stand in a cell which lacked light and circulating air. Many did not survive a visit to the standing cells.The basement in the prison building was used for the first experiments in killing large quantities of people using Zyklon-B. During a three day period in 1941, over 850 (600 Soviet POWs and 250 Poles) were killed in these experiments after being chosen from the infirmary. These experiments were the precursors to killing on a much larger scale in the gas chambers to be built at Birkenau. Because of this and the fact that medical treatment was poor at best, the infirmary was known within the camp as the “crematorium waiting room.” People who were sick or injured and considered unlikely to be able to return to work were killed by lethal injection or in the gas chambers. The “patients” at the infirmary were also used frequently for medical and pharmacological experiments. In a separate building many women were housed and used for sterilization experiments. They were then sometimes killed so that autopsies could be performed on their bodies. The first picture below is of two buildings in the four-building infirmary block. The second is of the room in which lethal injections were carried out.Those persons at the camp who died were then sent to the crematorium for disposal. Before the war, the building had been used as a munitions bunker but was transformed into a morgue and crematorium by the Nazis. The portion of the building used as a morgue was eventually further transformed to function as a gas chamber to kill thousands of people. Canisters of Zyklon-B were dropped in through a hole in the ceiling (see the fifth picture) where the chemical agent was activated by the body heat of those in the room. It would then give off noxious vapors which were deadly when inhaled. Most who met their end this way were sent immediately upon arrival, after their selection as persons who would not be fit as workers. Much of the facility was dismantled by the Nazis after they built the much larger facilities at Birkenau, but was rebuilt by the museum with much of the original materials.That sums up most of the information I have about specific buildings and functions of the Auschwitz I camp. For a further view of what the camp looks like though, I will throw in some other pictures I took while there. Then I will move on to discuss Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the site of the most concentrated and deadly atrocities in human history.(Note: There is no special significance of Block 7a, it’s just the building I was closest too when I decided that I wanted to get a picture like this.)

Auschwitz II-Birkenau

Compared to Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau (“Birkenau”) is absolutely massive. I can’t remember the exact figures, but I believe that while around 20,000 prisoners were kept at Auschwitz I, over 100,000 were housed at Birkenau. This is also where the majority of the mass killings took place in large gas chambers. Similar to the protocol at Auschwitz, when the trains carrying thousands of prisoners arrived at Birkenau, Nazi doctors proceeded to select which of them were fit for labor. The selection process was very brief and the doctor only took a cursory look at the prisoners’ faces, necks, and bodies. Those not fit for labor were sent to the gas chambers to be killed. Much of the facilities at Birkenau were destroyed by the Nazis as they fled the camp, including the very large gas chamber facilities. My pictures below display the barracks that remain as well as the chimneys of those that were destroyed.The insides of these barracks should be familiar to anyone who has ever seen pictures of concentration camps. Early on all the barracks were built from bricks by the prisoners, using materials from Polish houses in the area which had been confiscated and then dismantled. When they ran out of bricks, they continued to build barracks but used wood pre-designed to be used as stables. As stables, the buildings were intended to house around 20 horses. As prisoner barracks, the buildings housed close to 1,000 people. Below are some pictures of both kinds of barracks, including a mock-up with straw, representing what it would have looked like at the time, which was displayed in a building at Auschwitz I. The living conditions were terrible as each compartment was to house five people and would often be covered in sweat, blood, urine, and excrement from the prisoners. These conditions alone led to the deaths of innumerable prisoners. The restroom facilities were worse than those at Auschwitz I and are also pictured below.Of course, far and away the most potent method of murdering the prisoners took place in the gas chambers. Thousands of prisoners would be taken to the gas chambers immediately after having arrived at the train platform in Birkenau. Prisoners came to camp with suitcases and other possessions as they had often been told that they were being sent to Poland to “work” and start a new life. To keep them from panicking when sending them to their deaths, the soldiers told them to write their surnames and dates of birth on their luggage so that it could be returned to them. Then they were led to what they were told were shower facilities. After they had been packed into the chambers, canisters of Zyklon-B were dropped into the room similarly as in Auschwitz I. After a doctor had confirmed that all were dead, their bodies were removed from the chamber, all valuables were removed from their bodies, including jewelry and even gold teeth, and then the bodies were cremated. The gas chambers and crematories were located in the same building for efficiency. Again, all these facilities were destroyed, but some semblance of them remains. The second to last picture shows a picture of the facility taken while the camp was in operation. (In the last picture a diagram of the original facility is provided, where the upper wing labeled D is the gas chamber and the crematorium incinerators are on the right and labeled F.)The Nazis saved all of the prisoners’ belongings and jewelry and much of it remains on exhibition in a building in Auschwitz I. You cannot take pictures inside, but there are displays of thousands of suitcases, shoes, pots and pans, silverware, combs and toothbrushes, Jewish prayer shawls, and other valuables. There is even a display of thousands of pounds of hair which was removed from the prisoners when they entered the camp to work. The hair was to be sent to textile factories to be woven into fabrics.

Lastly, I will provide you with some additional pictures taken onsite at Birkenau. I have read afterwards that there is a “Sauna” building in which prisoners coming in to be workers were undressed, their heads were shaved, and they were given a scalding hot shower to sanitize them. Apparently this building still exists and is open as an exhibit, but I did not see it, nor was I pointed to it by my guide.

In Conclusion

That wraps up my report on my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I hope that you have found it informative if not also interesting. I learned a tremendous amount from my experience and I don’t think you can truly appreciate the magnitude on which people were killed and the cruelty with which the prisoners were treated unless you see the camp in person. While I did not find my visit to be overwhelming emotionally, it was still a very powerful experience. This is true more so now that I have gone back and examined the information I learned along with the pictures I took.