visiting Auschwitz

Yesterday, we went to Auschwitz to see the site where the Nazis murdered millions of people, mostly European Jews.

We'd had a good experience with Cracow Tours the previous day, so we went with them again. We were picked up at our hotel by mini-bus around 9:15am, transferred to a central location where we got on a big bus. It was certainly a popular tour as the bus was nearly full.

During the hour-plus drive from Krakow to Auschwitz I, we were shown a video featuring footage taken by the Russian Red Army when they liberated the camp in 1945. (Auschwitz consists of three actual camps; the original Auschwitz I, the largest Auschwitz II Birkenau, and the smaller Auschwitz III Monowitz, strategically located near a Germany factory so they could use the prisoners as forced labor.) As expected, it was a disturbing video, and between the video content, the somewhat bumpy ride, and the lack of circulation in the bus, both of us were a bit queasy when we arrived.

We spent nearly two hours touring the barracks and exhibits at Auschwitz I with a local guide, Simon. He was informative, opinionated, and had a strong local connection; his great-uncle had been imprisoned at Auschwitz for "political" reasons, and his wife's grandmother had nearly ended up inside as well, after trying to give food to some of the prisoners. Luckily for the grandmother, her husband had managed to bribe the SS men into letting her go.

Looking at numbers like "3 million Poles" or "6 million people", we know intellectually that it's a lot of people, but it's hard to get a real grasp on the scale of what happened there. Some of the exhibits helped a bit; there was a 30-meter long display filled with two tons of human hair (the Nazis shaved women's heads and used the hair to make blankets and jacket linings), another of thousands of eyeglasses, one of several thousand suitcases (representing a single train of arriving prisoners, when trains arrived multiple times a day), and more.

We also saw suffocation cells, starvation cells, standing cells (about a square meter, in which up to four prisoners were forced to stand), a gas chamber (where up to 3000 prisoners could be murdered at a time), a crematorium (where over 300 bodies would be cremated every day), mass gallows, a courtyard where shootings were carried out, lots of barbed wire fences, small huts where SS men would stand in inclement weather, and the infamous German "Work will set you free" sign over the gate of Auschwitz I.

Simon told us some stories; he's met several survivors of Auschwitz, and even now, they are badly scarred by their experiences. One woman can't stand striped clothing, because they were forced to wear stripes. Another man saw a funeral shortly after leaving the camp and couldn't reconcile all the crying and mourning with "just one coffin". Some former prisoners have severe reactions to white smocks, the German language, and other triggers.

We heard about a priest, Father Kolbe, took the place of another prisoner in a starvation cell, and when he failed to die after having been starved for several weeks, the frustrated SS men shot him to death. Later he was canonized by the Catholic Church and made a saint.

Simon also told us about a woman who was an obstetrician, who gave illegal abortions to women who arrived pregnant. Visibly pregnant women were immediately "selected" for death, but women who were early enough in their pregnancies might escape initial detection. Once they started showing, they would be killed, so the abortions allowed them to perhaps live longer. For the prisoners, often the only goal was to survive another day.

Several hundred people tried to escape Auschwitz, and some succeeded. In one successful attempt, four prisoners who had good "jobs" managed to steal SS uniforms and guns, and actually walked out of the camp posing as high officials. The Nazis punished escapes and escape attempts severely; if one person tried to escape, ten people from his/her barrack would be killed, to serve as a warning. There were also attempts at rebellion but none succeeded.

We saw walls and walls of prisoner photos, mostly political and non-Jewish. (After 1942, when Auschwitz evolved from a labor camp into a death camp, most Jews were killed immediately and not registered and photographed.) When prisoners arrived in the camp, 75% were "selected" for instant death by gas chamber (the elderly, the sick, children, pregnant women), and the others were sent to the labor camps to work 11 hours a day on a daily diet of 1500-1700 calories. Auschwitz II Birkenau (which was huge, 425 acres and ten times the size of Auschwitz I) was built using the forced labor of these prisoners. Those who worked generally lasted only a few months before dying of exhaustion, starvation, and/or disease.

There were only a few latrines in the camp, and prisoners were only allowed to use the facilities twice a day; once in the morning and once at night. Because of starvation diarrhea, prisoners ended up soiling themselves regularly, and as a result, typhus, dysentery, and other diseases were rampant. The Nazis actually avoided the toilet areas because they were afraid of catching the diseases, leaving one area where prisoners could more safely communicate and effect black market transactions of items found on dead bodies and in suitcases of arriving prisoners.

The belongings of the prisoners were sorted, cleaned, and sent to Germany. Gold teeth were melted down, clothing was disinfected, and jewelry and valuables were extracted from various hiding places. Belongings which had not yet been sent away were stored in storehouses which were nicknamed "Canada" by the prisoners, as Canada was considered a land of plenty. On the signs that we saw, the storehouses were actually labelled "Canada I", "Canada II", etc.

There was an exhibit with photos which attempted to document the degree to which the prisoners were starved. One woman weighed about 23 kg (50 lbs) when she was liberated. In the photos of her four months after liberation, she still looked completely emaciated. Several prisoners died after leaving the camp because they tried to eat normally, and their stomachs could no longer deal with the food.

After looking at the exhibits at Auschwitz I, we went to Auschwitz II Birkenau a few kilometers away. There was no museum there, only empty barracks, but the vastness of the place was much more striking. The Nazis destroyed much of the camp when they realized the Russian Red Army was advancing on them, but there are still ruins that go for miles.

By the numbers: about 6 million people, mostly Jews, were killed by the Nazis in concentration camps during World War II (of course, many more died outside the camps, in battle and otherwise). Other groups which were targeted were: political prisoners (Poles, Russians, and more), gypsies, homosexuals, and other "undesirables". About 1.3 million of those were imprisoned at Auschwitz, of which about 1.1 million died. Only prisoners at Auschwitz were tattooed with registration numbers. Before the war, there were about 3.5 million Jewish people in Poland, which was nearly a third of the population. About 3 million Polish Jews were killed by the Nazis in the camps, and many others must have fled, because there are only tens of thousands left today. Jews were sent to Auschwitz from all over Europe; France, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and other occupied areas. Great Britain escaped this fate, as it was not occupied, having won the Battle of Britain. In one particularly brutal period, half of all Hungarian Jews (over 400,000 people) were sent to Auschwitz and murdered in a period of only 56 days. Overall, about 6 million Polish people died during World War II, which is about 20% of the pre-war population.

A variety of political and ethical questions remain. Simon seemed to think that the Allies should have taken action during the war to bomb the camp, the train lines, or otherwise break the mechanism and delay the killings. Others question the local population and ask if they were not anti-Semitic, why they didn't do anything to help. In one heated exchange, a person on our tour accused Simon of spreading propaganda and actually compared the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the atrocities committed by the Nazis, which I thought was ridiculous (and I think the rest of the group did too). Godwin's Law, indeed!

It was true that Simon had a strong anti-Soviet bent; he told us "anyone who says Poland accepted Communism is lying", and also mentioned that his great-uncle who survived Auschwitz only to be imprisoned by the Communists later. But, I imagine Poland suffered quite a bit during the Iron Curtain days, so his animosity is likely justified.

Anyway, Simon handled the situation pretty gracefully and proceeded with the rest of the tour. As I told D later, it's possible that Simon had a biased view, but it seemed to be a very Polish view, and that's why we're in Poland; to hear about that viewpoint.

In the end, we were both glad that we had gone to Auschwitz; it's one thing to hear in clinical terms about millions of people being killed, but it's yet another to hear the stories and see the possessions and the eerily normal-looking brick barracks.