lessons on war and genocide...

During our stay in Krakow, Poland, we took a day trip to the concentration and death camps in Auschwitz. It is definitely a hard experience to process; we learned and saw things that not all have the opportunity to experience first hand. I will try and give a description and my own thoughts on our tour. I realize that this is a long post but you will learn a lot about the Holocaust if you read it through. Also, I spent over two hours writing this between class and working on my creative project because I think it is important.

We first went to Auschwitz-Birkenau which was divided into a concentration (or work) camp and death camp, separated by a chain-link fence and barbed wire.

When the Nazis invaded Poland, they cleared out the western part of the country in an attempt to expel Jews and unify German-speakers. The first prisoners of Auschwitz were Soviet POWs that were made to build the entire camp. They were brought in June 1940 and totaled 15,000 prisoners. The conditions were so bad and the POWs were so poorly treated that only 90 prisoners survived the war. Many died from bad weather and from being overworked while others were just murdered. The Nazis also deeply hated communists, as you can see.

On January 20, 1942, Hitler and Heydrich hold the Wansee Conference where they essentially plan out the Holocaust. Hitler was literally paranoid that every country that declared war on Germany was a part of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany. They originally planned to exterminate 11 million Jews from all over the world. To carry out this evil plan, the Nazis needed a larger capacity in camps and “more efficient” ways of killing. (The terminology used by the Nazis is absolutely horrifying. They spoke of humans like they were animals or worse. One can see their evil just in the words they used to talk about people they considered inferior.) By that point in the war, the Eastern front was not going very well and they no longer needed Auschwitz for Soviet POWs. They began bringing train-loads of Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau and exterminated them immediately. Later, the Nazis realized that they needed workers and that’s when they began doing “selections.”

When a train arrived to the camp, SS doctors would stand outside the train and select those who looked strong and able to work. 200,000 of these “able” Jews and 200,000 Poles, gypsies, homosexuals and Soviets lived in the camp to provide slave labor for the Nazis.

We walked into a barrack where people lived under awful conditions. They had bunks, one on the dirt and two more wooden ones stacked above. People would have to work their way up to the top, earn the right to sleep on the top bunk. At the point of its highest capacity, six to seven people would sleep on one bed.

A few things about the barracks made me sick. First, the Nazis put criminals in charge of each barrack. Criminals were “perfect” for the job because they were already twisted and would easily adopt Nazi ideals. In many cases, the criminal barrack leaders treated the prisoners worse than the SS. You can imagine that the breakfast coffee, lunch soup and dinner bread was not usually distributed equitably among prisoners.

Another sickening aspect of the barracks was the quotes put on the walls by the Nazis. They wrote very sardonic things like, “being clean is your duty,” “one louse is your death,” “keep calm,” “be honest,” etc. The Nazis claimed that the Jews were dirty then made them to fit that claim in such poor conditions. They focused on minor values like hygiene and totally missed the important values like not murdering people! This was German thoroughness used for absolute evil. They would also fumigate the barracks with the same chemical (cyclone B) they used in the gas chambers. The women were forced to leave their clothes in the barracks to be fumigated and had to stand outside naked for up to 8 hours. Sometimes, selections would be made during that time as well.

Of the 400,000 people that came to the concentration camp, 200,000 died of hunger, cold or Typhus. 200,000 survived Auschwitz (not necessarily the Holocaust), of which 193,000 were moved west to another camp. 7,000 prisoners were liberated from the camp on January 27, 1945, and approximately 60,000 slaves from Auschwitz survived the war altogether.

In the death camp portion of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a total of 900,000 Jews were murdered right after arriving at the camp. They eventually extended the train so that it went directly to the section of the camp with the gas chambers and crematorium. For these 900,000 souls, there was no registry, no names taken down. “Men to the left, Women to the right,” were some of the last words they would hear.

After stepping out of the train, they were filed into the undressing facility. The capacity of the gas chambers was 1500 or 2000 with small children. It is really disturbing to think of all the naked people locked in the dark gas chamber. An SS officer would then pour granules of cyclone B in the chamber from above which mixed with the air to create cyanide. From the outside, you could hear screams for 20 minutes; people fighting to reach the top of the chamber for the last bit of oxygen. The limiting factor for the murdering was also the ability to burn bodies. The crematoria could burn 4756 bodies per day. Some corpses were burned outside because the capacity was not large enough.

The Nazis selected certain strong, young, Jewish men to be the sondokommandos. They had to move the corpses from the gas chambers to the crematoria and pull out gold teeth and sheer all the long hair. Those men must have been completely traumatized for life. Every couple of months, the sondokommandos were killed so that information wouldn’t get out and a new group was trained to do the Nazi’s dirty work. By accident, 80 sondokommandos survived the war and one wrote a book entitled How to Cry without Tears. I’ve been told that is a great resource for learning about the Nazi psyche.

There is now a memorial to those who were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They have plaques in every language of people that were killed there (and an English plaque) saying “For ever let this place be a cry of despair and warning to humanity, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women and children mainly Jews from various countries of Europe.” One thing that struck me is that a whole language went extinct because of the Holocaust. Ladino, a language very close to Spanish, was spoken by a community of Jews that was expelled from Spain during the Inquisition and immigrated to Greece. After 14 days on a train to Auschwitz, Ladino-speaking Jews were exterminated and the language is now dead.

If you will bear with me… I will tell you about the former possessions of Jews that I saw on display at Auschwitz I, another concentration camp.

The most impacting piece of evidence of the Nazi’s crimes is the massive pile of human hair. The Nazis sold hair to textile companies for making cloth. 7 tons of human hair was found after the war. 2 tons of women’s hair was on display which belonged to 40,000-60,000 women before they were gassed. The hair is distinguishable but it is all grey now because it still has traces of cyclone B. Within 15 years, all the hair will disintegrate. That means that I am one of the last witnesses of this evidence.

They had a case full of children’s shoes and another room full of adult shoes- 40,000 pairs of shoes filling a room. That is only 4% of the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. There was another room full of suitcases that were brought to the camps by prisoners. The owner’s name and date of arrival was written on the front. One belonged to an orphan girl who probably went directly to the gas chamber.

Another display case had prosthetic legs, arms, hands, etc. I did not expect to see that display. One man reports hearing a man screaming from inside the gas chamber that he was being murdered by the country that he gave up his leg for in the last war. Eyeglasses, pots and pans, combs, brushes and prayer shawls followed.

While I did not take pictures of these personal possessions, the image is burned into my memory and I will not forget.

“The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again.”

-George Santayana