A Day at Auschwitz

I previously wrote about my trip to Krakow, Poland in a separate blog (A Different Trip) and saved my experience about Auschwitz for a separate blog, this blog actually.

My friends and I visited Poland mostly to see Auschwitz, which was debatably the only reason. Though we knew Krakow was a wonderful town, we came with the intention to visit the camp to really see the history that we have learned about for so many years in school.

Now before I dive into my day at Auschwitz, I want to emphasize again how I really can’t put some things into words. The things I saw and the experience I had can only be described by going and standing on the campsite where millions of people were murdered. Even then, I know I will never truly feel the fear, trauma, and desperation these people felt when they were sentenced to death by the Nazi Germans as they were stripped of their clothing, family and dignity in the hatred of the Holocaust. I also can’t even begin to describe every single thing I saw and learned.

The first stop in Auschwitz was to the first camp. Right as we entered, we saw the gate I have seen in so many history books and pictures. The gate reads, “Arbeit Macht Frei” which means “Work Makes You Free”. No one was free here though. Hitler would promise the Jews, Poles, gypsies, and more that came through these gates a new life full of work and pleasure. They would pack up a bag weighing less than 20 kilograms, hop on carts packed with over 100 people and travel for days if not weeks to their new homes. I had an eerie feeling as I walked under the gate, thinking of the millions of men, women, and children even my age walking under these gates, passing by the electric fences that would kill them with a single touch.

People were brought to this camp because others were overcrowded. Now to put this into perspective, the small barracks they had here held over 11,000 people. For the camps to be overcrowded meant the people had to have been packed more so than sardines and the overflow too much for even the Nazi Germans to handle.

As we continued our tour, we heard about the daily routines of a prisoner at Auschwitz. Woken up at the crack of dawn, prisoners lined up in rows of five. Other prisoners were in the orchestra, playing music the entire time as they were counted to see if anyone was missing. If someone was, others suffered. The Nazi Germans didn’t bother to think about the possibilities of starvation and death, so the loss of one person meant the starvation of about five the next day.

The entire camp was gloomy, not only because of the rainy weather, but just the thought that we were walking where these others had walked only about 75 years ago. It was almost too hard to wrap my head around, even though I was standing at the most preserved concentration camp. It was extremely surreal.

We were told that the camp was preserved and owned by the country of Poland. The point was to educate others and remind them of what happened so it does not happen again. Now let me just pause here and talk a little about my insight from the tour on our guide, a solemn Polish woman, and her emphasis on the word “evidence”. How everything there was evidence that this event actually happened. I was thinking well of course, how could anyone deny this, but then I was informed that people do deny it. I was in utter shock. Here I was standing on the grounds that millions of people were killed at, looking at the barracks, looking at the electric fences, looking at the train tracks they were brought in on. How could someone not believe this?

We saw a quote from George Santayana saying, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, and I thought to all of those people that didn’t believe in this  event.

We learned about some of the facts of the Nazi Germans and Auschwitz. There were 1,300,000 people killed in Auschwitz. 1,100,000 of these people were Jews, about 140,000 were Poles, about 23,000 of them were Romans, about 15,000 were Soviet prisoners of war, and the rest were a mixture of other race and religions. Our tour guide made sure we knew that they were all innocent. Every single one of them, regardless of what fake documents the Nazi Germans wrote about them, condemning them of crimes ranging from theft to simply picking grass.

Here, these people were brought to these camps against their own will and then told that they had committed crimes and sentenced to death. If they weren’t killed right when they arrived on the platforms of the camp, they were then taken to a doctor for selection. A simple look and a nod was the difference between life and death. Sometimes this meant they were sent straight to gas chambers, or sent to work at the camps and live a life of starvation, disease, harsh weather conditions, and more. Most of the prisoners starved to death, the worst kind of death possible as these people lost over two thirds of their entire body weight. They were fed three meals if they were lucky. The first was “coffee” which was really a mixture of water and herbs for color. The second was a mixture of water and “vegetables” though typically something like the skins of a potato if that. They were fed bread which was really just ground wood to give the appearance of bread with no nutritional value. Seeing the pictures of these people was disturbing, but again, our guide told us this was evidence and “fortunately” these photos were taken.

Here I was, a girl who has probably never missed a meal in her life and gets a foamy latte just about every day and still finding a way to complain about just the smallest things in life like being unable to travel to every country I want in study abroad or having to eat in most nights of the week.

We learned about the gas chambers, which I’ll get to later, but touched on how the air was so poisonous because of the gas. To see the containers that held the gas piled up in a room was hard to see, but what really got to me was the next room.

Some rooms we weren’t allowed to take pictures in and I realized why as we walked into one of them. There were piles on piles of hair. Yes, hair. I was confused at first, and then reminded that as prisoners came in, they were often shaved. Men and women had their hair shaved off, and even after they were in the gas chamber their hair was collected. The hair was made into clothes and different items and sold. Not only were these people treated worse than animals, they were being used for business. I couldn’t stop shaking and I felt like I was going to get sick walking through this room.

If the hair we saw wasn’t proof enough, we saw sunglasses, pots and pans, hairbrushes, and more that filled entire rooms feet upon feet deep. The toughest thing was seeing a room of shoes.

Now here I took a picture of some of the shoes. The picture I took was about one twelfth of just one side of the room we were in, so let’s say one twenty-fourth of the entire room we were standing in.

That’s a lot of shoes, right? Well, those 60,000 pairs of shoes in just that room was less than five percent of people murdered just at Auschwitz.

Less than five percent. Now that really put things into perspective for me.

We passed more barracks where these innocent people were kept, or should I say packed. No room for sleeping, let alone crouching in some areas. These harsh conditions were followed by strenuous labor while given no nutrition or even a change of clothes. They were forced to where their striped pajamas marked with a symbol.  The children didn’t get a break either, they were treated just as terribly. Sometimes they were taken to be experimented on, especially twins. Taken advantage of being prisoners they were forced to have injections, tests, and more for simply the glory of a scientist.

I couldn’t even imagine. The entire time during this tour my mind was racing simply trying to imagine what it was like and I still couldn’t. I tried to imagine myself or loved ones in these conditions, and couldn’t see how we would have survived if we were lucky enough to even make it past the initial deaths some prisoners were put through. They squeezed about 40 people into a room smaller than my room in my apartment back in Prague without any light, without room to sleep, without food, and stripped of their dignity. They survived two to three days, if that at times. I sometimes get annoyed when I can hear my roommates in the other room across the hall. I simply could not imagine.

A place was devoted to execution, and we stopped to remember the lives lost. Though we had to remember, the entire place we were in was a memorial and a cemetery for the people who lost their lives there. I felt like I couldn’t even take enough moments of silence for all of the lives lost.

The gas chamber we saw was something I never want to experience again. Prisoners were told they were to take a shower. They entered, in packs of about three to four hundred and stripped their clothes in a tiny cement room. They moved into the next room, packed next to each other, where we could even see the shower heads where gas was actually sprayed. There, they were exterminated. Exterminated. That was the word used. Not killed, not murdered, but exterminated. Words that should never be used on a human being, but were.

I imagined my sorority chapter at home, consisting of almost three hundred (amazing) women and that huge number of girls with names and faces. That’s even less than how many people were killed in just these rooms in just minutes. These were actual people with families and loved ones and jobs and homes. Gone with the other 3,000 people that were killed in a single gas chamber in a day. Apparently, burning (not cremating because that’s too nice of a word for this) wasn’t enough for the Nazi Germans.

We were all silent, as we were the entire tour, but you could hear more than just a pin drop in the silence of the gas chamber. Our guide gave us a quote that I can’t remember exactly where she got it that said, “This is a concentration camp, the only way out is through the gas chamber window”.  Chills.

Next we made our way to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I didn’t think I could do another camp, I really didn’t think so.

This camp was huge. Actually, huge doesn’t describe it. I could walk around the camp for an entire day and probably not hit every row between barracks that were there in the 430 acres that made it up. The worst part? The camp was made by the prisoners there and was supposed to be three times the size it was. Three. Over seven Polish villages were evacuated for this camp. The fields stretched so far I could hardly see the end. How could they have even made it bigger?

We walked down the train tracks hearing about the lack of drinking water and the horrible conditions that continued. The entire place was mud when all of this was happening. In the winter, the mud froze to ice.

I was absolutely freezing in my North Face fleece and water proof jacket with a fuzzy interior as we stood and heard about the facts in the rain. It was April 25th when I went, so to imagine being there in the heart of winter when temperatures are much, much colder seemed absolutely unbearable. Even in the summer, when temperatures are much higher, the weather itself was enough to torture someone.

We saw more “evidence” with a cart that they had found that was reconstructed. The cart was to hold 100 people if not more for over weeks as they traveled to the camp. The barracks were full of mud and a lack of anything that could sustain human life in the way they were being treated. Bunk beds caused some people to sleep on the floors, getting ill and dying off simply because of that. Rats covered them in their sleep and some people couldn’t even sleep at night as they were crawling all over them.

We saw the “toilets” that the prisoners were allowed to use just twice a day. Some of the prisoners had diarrhea, so this was absolute torture for them. If you were a prisoner, the best job was often to clean out these toilets, because at least you were inside some sort of shelter from the weather and you often smelled so poorly from the human waste that the guards wanted to stay far enough away from you so you wouldn’t get beaten. How horrible to think that the job of cleaning the feces of others was the best job they could of had at this time.

Our stop at the memorial in Birkenau was another reminder that the entire place was really a memorial. There were plaques lining the end of the camp in different languages to signify all of the different people that were killed. There was one in English, but we were told that it really shouldn’t be there and is only there so tourists can understand what the other plaques are saying.

Some roses were on the memorial. We were told they aren’t usually there, but since we were there during the March of Importance, they were there. This march was why I had a hard time booking a tour. Every year, a group of individuals marches through the memorials in honor and memory of the lives lost and to show that the Jewish religion is still strong.

Crematoriums were burned to try and hide evidence, and we even saw one that had collapsed but kept in its original state and will always stay that way. Ashes of those who died were spread all over, simply because it came out of the gas chambers and spread around the camp. What a sad, sad thought to think about.

These two camps we visited are part of a third camp located nearby, Auschwitz three. The camps make a shape. The shape of a triangle. The symbol put on the pajamas of these prisoners to mark them. It seemed like my entire visit was full of chills and shudders, but that one left me feeling too eerie.

It’s hard to even think about the millions of ways these people were treated wrongly. It’s also impossible to cover all the information I was given in my four hours at just these two concentration and death camps. The feelings of being upset, sad, angry, frustrated, and simply taken aback didn’t leave me from the moment I got in and even until now as I write this blog over two days after leaving the camps.

It was an experience like no other, and as my tour guide mentioned, something people need to see at least once in their lifetime. I thought I knew a lot from books and movies about the Holocaust and the lives these people lived, but I realized how little I really knew and how fortunate I am to live the life I do. The eye opening experience sure does make me more grateful for the life I have and a higher appreciation for knowledge so that history doesn’t repeat itself.

Though this wasn’t a happy experience, it was definitely impactful. I needed to see the things I did, though unpleasant just about the entirety of our time at the camps. I am a full proponent that this is something people really need to see for themselves to really grasp.