Auchwitz-Birkenau

This is one of my more serious posts. Though not as graphic as the one from last year dealing with the Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields… The topic of Auschwitz is just as grim, if not more so.

On this day, it rained… it shifted back and forth between thunder showers and a constant drizzle. Appropriate weather for where we were going. We opted to take a private tour, as we figured it would be cheaper and more informative in the end… and faster to get there. Which was very true… as we learned, b/c the driver sped the whole way there. At one point I looked out the window to see a camel. Yes I said a camel… a real one, just sort of chilling out in someone’s back yard. I was there with my friend Shiva that I met the night before (and I’ll talk about more later)… when we got there we had to wait for the English speaking guide, so we had time to take coffee. I took a Turkish coffee, as Shiva said she would read my coffee grains… [ strong woman, married 2 kids, need to leave my past behind, attachment to Egypt]… We met another girl from slovakia I think… I’m not sure, she was a teacher named Tanya. [quasi important later]… then we got our headsets… brilliant idea… give the guide a microphone and everyone a headset, so everyone can hear as you are wandering around. And then we began…

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest Nazi death camp. Originally just a concentration and labor camp, where polish intellectuals were sent, the camp was extended to Auschwitz II, where the primary purpose was death, especially towards the end of the war, where it was used for mass exterminations. Something around 1.2 million people died here. 90% of the individuals here were Jews, others included Poles (intellectuals), Soviets, Gypsies, and Homosexuals.

We took a tour through the camp; first the original camp, with its brick barracks… deceptively nice for someone passing by, as they were in fact, originally built as military barracks. But as you go through you hear the history. You see where prisoners lived, their faces staring back at you from the walls where their photos hang. Nazi efficiency, cataloging the people. At least in the beginning… when the camp turned to just an extermination camp, and as the Nazis where pulling out, they destroyed records, and the gas chambers so that people wouldn’t know what they had done.

As you go through the rooms, you see where individuals were tortured, or punished, and where people were experimented upon. The courtyards where executions took place. There are whole individual rooms filled with luggage, shoes, brushes, glasses, hair. Hair is the worse… it has an odor to it. Some still has some color to it, and they are all in braids. They even had an example of what the Nazi’s did with the hair: the sold it to be used as blankets and the lining of uniforms. Tests of these linings showed residue of the gas used during executions.. indicating the hair was shaved afterwards. We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside the rooms… I don’t really think that anyone would want to.

The Second part of the Camp was huge. There is a video below to show how far it stretched. To my surprise there are houses not all that far off. And I couldn’t help but wonder how people could live and wake up everyday to see this place on the other side of the road. But at the same time, the memory of living just a few blocks from Toul Sleng prison in Cambodia, and eating regularly across the street comes creeping into my head.

Overall, the experience was a bit on the surreal side. Touching, solemn, but definitely worth while.