August 11 Auschwitz

I can still vividly remember the summer of '68, sleep away camp at a girls Jewish camp. It was a tradition one night every summer to bring all the campers into the dining hall turned cinema and show the film Let My People Go. It was a horrific visual display of concentration camp victims, dead and alive. 

I can remember years later sitting through the devastating hours of the film Shoah, released in two parts, for a total of seven hours. Later, Shindler's List, depressing and tragic, but with hope and a hero. Never did I think I would go and see first hand the place where so much of this cruel and torturous extermination took place but you cannot be in Krakow and not make the trip. 

There are only two good things about Nazis. 

1) They kept incredibly detailed, meticulous records that allow us to today know and piece together the truth.

2) They lost the war and the survivors, few that there were, were liberated.

During the three and a half hour tour, the only voice we heard was our guide. No one talked, no questions were asked. It was somber and austere. There is no Disneyfication of anything, it is not needed, it is abominable enough without embellishment. 

At Auschwitz I, we walked through block after block of brick buildings, built to house concentration camp inmates- at first Russian prisoners of war, then Roma, Hungarians, criminals and Jews. But concentration camps by definition were labor camps, where the sadistic Nazis took hungry, freezing prisoners and forced them to do the hard labor that enabled the building of camps that morphed from concentration to extermination.

We walked by blocks where the forced sterilizations were done, where the Therezenstadt Jews were held in special conditions allowing the creation of global propaganda supporting Nazi proclamations of fair and responsible treatment. We saw not just the hair cut from the Jews after they were gassed, but the cloth made from the hair. We saw thousands of pairs of crushed eyeglasses, thousands of pots and pans, thousands of shoes of women, men and children- right there in the very spot where they were taken. We stood in a gas chamber and stared at the small hole where the crystals were poured in as the catalyst for the slow thirty minutes of suffocation. 

All this was horrifying but small scale and nothing in compared to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, just three kilometers away and built not for labor, but only for mass extermination to support the Final Solution to eradicate all Jews. Walking through the gates of this camp was like being in every movie about WWII you have ever seen. As far as you could see there were barracks or the remnants of barracks. This was twenty times bigger and five hundred times worse. We stood on THE platform, where the train cars were unloaded and men and women and children were quickly looked over- with a slight turn right or left of the commandant's thumb, they were sent to be gassed, or saved to be worked to death, starved to death or die from desperation.

We saw the guard towers, the barbed wire, the blocks with long cement benches with seventy holes that served as latrines for hundreds of camp victims. Beds that were no more than 2 x 3 meter spaces on cement and mud floors for ten men head to foot, with another bed only two feet above and another on top of that. We saw the actual yard between block 10 and 11 in Auschwitz I, where executions were held. We saw and heard much, much more.

But the most poignant was the remains of the large gas chambers and crematoriums. The Nazis, knowing they were facing defeat, attempted to destroy their evidence. The walls are gone but the foundations remain leaving the outline visible and the story alive.  Auschwitz-Birkenau was the mother of all camps, with one million three hundred thousand people exterminated, almost all were Jews. It was built to decimate an entire population. 

There are no photos for the blog today. There are really no adequate words. These will have to do. Everyone should make this visit. There must be some way to eradicate this kind of hatred, now, today and forever.