Early at 7:00 a.m. we grabbed
breakfast bags which had been made for us by the hotel and set off for the
Polish town of Oswięcim. The city was located on a major train track
between East and West. Shalmi reminded
us that one of the reasons why the Holocaust was considered modern murder was
the use of technology and one of the most important aspects was
transportation. The Nazis decided it
was easier and more efficient to transport victims to the factories of death,
rather than kill them on location. Here
in the outskirts of Oswięcim,
the Nazis would establish Konzentration Lager [KL] Auschwitz. Auschwitz was not one camp but was a complex
of three primary sites: Auscwhitz I was
the administrative center and concentration camp for primarily Polish
prisoners, Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II] was the death camp, and Buna
[Auschwitz III] was for manufacturing and testing facilities, which also had
dozens of labor sub-camps. “How do we
explain man’s behavior here? “ Shalmi asked.
“A factory which produces death.
So far we have been unable to come up with definitive answers. As long as we don’t know why; none of us can
say we couldn’t or wouldn’t do this, which is in itself a warning.”
Wojciech, who has guided us
through Auschwitz I multiple times and who we always request, was guiding
another group from Sweden today, so we were pleased to have been assigned his
wife, Agnieszka [Agi] to take us through the camp. We got our headsets and set out with Agi into
the cold and very windy weather. The
first thing she said was that she did not consider herself a guide. “Only those who came here and survived this
place, can guide,” she said. “I consider
myself a story teller.”
We started under the iconic
sign: Arbeit Macht Frei. There,
she gave us the history of the camp.
Built in the town of Oswiecim, Auschwitz is the Germanization of the
name of the town. It was established by
the Nazis in 1940 and was in use until the Allied liberation in 1945. The camp has 28 brick buildings, called
Blocks, which served as barracks. The
camp is 200 meters long by 300 meters wide.
There were 700-1000 people housed in each building. The capacity of Auschwitz was 20,000
inmates. Agi asked what the sign, Arbeit Macht Frei meant and when
students answered “Work makes you free” she noted that for her, there was an
irony because the harder you worked the faster you died, so for her, ‘Work was
the way to Death’.
The living conditions in the
camp were severe ---hard work, starvation, disease and brutal treatment--- so
that the average time between one’s arrival in Auschwitz I and his death was
about 2 months. Agi showed us the kitchen which was a long building located to
the right of the gate. If you were
lucky, you had a job in the kitchen where they were safe from most of the
difficult jobs - they often had access
to some extra food, and were also protected from the weather extremes, and so
their chances of survival were better than those who had to labor outside.
Agi said that the exhibits we
would be seeing in the first blocks were created by survivors of Auschwitz in
1956 so we would be seeing what they wanted us to see. We started with Block 4 and a quote at the
entrance: “The one who does not remember
history is bound to live through it again.” --- George Santayana.
In 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union,
Heinrich Himmler ordered the enlargement
of the camp and Auschwitz-Birkenau was established. There another 300 buildings were constructed
for an additional 90,000 prisoners. In
1942 after the Wannsee Conference this camp starts to function as a death
camp. Agi showed us a map of the
European cities which transported Jews to Auschwitz and a plaque with the
numbers of victims. In the 5 years of the
operation of the camp, an estimated 1.3 million came and 1.1 million were
murdered. 90 % of the victims were
Jewish and most of them never saw the sign, Arbeit
Macht Frei as they were taken straight to Auschwitz-Birkenau and
executed. An urn with a small amount of
human ash in Block 4 symbolizes the lost of all these lives.
We
were shown glass cases in which were documentary evidence of the Nazi
processing of
Prisoners,
lists of countries from which Jews came (Hungary was the largest group, Norway
the smallest), pictures of the selection at the ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau as
Nazis determined who would live and who would die.
As
we climbed the stairs to the second floor of Block 4, we were shown a large
model of a gas chamber which we would see this afternoon in Birkenau and which
showed the three phases of its
operation. First, there was the
disrobing room where people were told to disrobe. They were often told to remember the number
on which they put their clothes, or make sure to tie their shoes together, some
were even given a piece of soap – all in the name of deception. A gas chamber could hold 1,500 people at a
time. The second phase was to have two
Zyklon B pellets dropped through the vents in the roof. The
Zyklon B pellets alone were harmless, and had been used in delousing,
but when dropped into water created a deadly hydrogen cyanide. In 20 minutes, all the people would be dead
and the room would be ventilated which required half an hour. The third phase required Jewish prisoners in
a special unit called the Sonderkommando to remove the bodies, shave the hair
and remove any gold teeth from the corpses, and then burn the bodies in the
underground crematorium. The average
length of time one served in the Sonderkommando before being killed himself,
was 3-4 months. About 80 Sonderkommando
survived the war and were able to provide testimony.
In Block 5 were exhibited the ‘evidence of
crimes’: belongings brought by victims
to Auschwitz, confiscated by the SS and found after liberation. Separate rooms containing shoes, eyeglasses,
prayer shawls, shaving kits, household cooking items, baby clothes, and other
items which had been packed in the labeled suitcases they packed. These provided physical evidence of the
existence of so many victims as well as some insight into what they might have
thought was their destination. Agi said
that the shoe polish, to her, was an indication that they had no clue what was
going to happen, but were focused on tomorrow, not knowing there would be no
tomorrow. A large room with a wall-to-wall
display case of human hair was especially moving. When the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz
they found 7 tons of women’s hair in
warehouses from 40,000 women who had been killed; the only remaining trace of
them. The hair was sold to textile
manufacturers for production of army uniforms or gloves and socks for railroad
workers.
In Block 11, we saw accommodations for prisoners who were
to be interrogated and/or punished.
Downstairs we saw three types of punishment cells: dark cell, starvation cell and the standing
cell in which three or four people could be forced to stand for days at a time. Punishment might be 3-5 days in one of these
cells for a minor infraction of a camp rule or 2 weeks for sabotage. One of the crimes was smoking in camp which
would give a prisoner 5 days in a standing cell. Smoking meant the prisoner had access to the
outside world and was able to smuggle in contraband. We were told that if one person escaped from
Auschwitz, that 10 other prisoners would be brought to one of these cells and
punished. Agi said that 147 people
successfully escaped from Auschwitz which meant that over 1400 people were taken to Block 11 and starved. Time in a punishment cell could be a death
sentence. We viewed the execution wall,
called the Wall of Death, between Blocks 10 and 11, where tens of thousands of
prisoners were lined up naked and shot once in the back of the head.
We next walked to Block
27. Agi reminded us that all we had seen
had been created by Holocaust survivors in the 1950’s. She told us that since that time many nations
such as the Netherlands and Hungary, had created special exhibits in other
barracks buildings. Three years ago, the
State of Israel sponsored such an exhibit designed by Yad Vashem, in Block
27. The exhibit began with a quote from
the diary of Zalman Gradowski, a member
of the Sondercommando. He had kept a
diary during his time in Auschwitz and
before his death, had buried his diary in the courtyard of Block 3, which was
later found. His quote said “Come here
you free citizen of the world, whose life is safeguarded by human morality and whose
existence is guaranteed through law. I
want to tell you how much modern criminals and despicable murderers have
trampled the morality of life and nullified the postulates of existence.”
The exhibition included a
large room with photographs and videos of European Jews pre-war. There were 11 million Jewish people in
Europe. 11 million Jewish people were to
be murdered, no matter where they lived or how they lived. In another room were large monitors with
speeches by Nazi leaders. In one speech
in 1939 Hitler states that the enemy of Germany, which must be totally
annihilated is the Jew. He openly states
his intent to kill all the Jews. This
was 8 months before the war and 3 years before the Wannsee Conference. There was a room with video testimony of
survivors: “How Jews Coped During the Holocaust” and a room “Traces of Life”
dedicated to the 1.5 million children murdered in the Holocaust which has small
drawings made by children in Terezin.
The highlight and last room
of the exhibit was called the Book of Names.
In a long room, a book as big as the room, fills two sides of 16,000
pages, listing the names and some information such as place of birth and
birthdate, place and date of death, if these were known, of more than four
million documented Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Students spent some time looking through the
pages, some looking for their own name, or the name of someone they knew.
Our last stop in Auschwitz I
was the crematorium of the camp. There
we saw the home of the camp commandant Rudolf Hoss and the gallows where he was
hanged for his war crimes on April 16, 1947.
The gallows was used once --- for his execution. We then walked through the crematorium which
was used to cremate the bodies of people who had perished in the camp.
After a brief bag lunch on
the bus as it was still cold and windy, we drove the short distance to Auschwitz-Birkenau
where Shami spent three hours showing us the death camp. He talked about how the camp had changed in
the spring of 1944 when the Nazis expected one million Hungarian Jews to be
transported here. It was then that they
added the rail spur coming into the camp, preparing for the influx of prisoners.
We visited the quarantine
barracks Towards the end of the war,
Germany needed more workers as they sent more men and young boys to the
front. Jewish workers were shipped into
Germany to fulfill that need. The
problem was that these Jews coming from camps were poorly nourished and could
have diseases and secondly, they were Jews:
according to Nazi racial ideology, by definition they were disease. Germany by now was essentially ‘Judenrein’
[Jew-free] but they were essential to the war effort so they were brought here
and housed [no sleeping area - just an
open space at one end and long rows of latrines at the other] for three days
until they were declared disease-free and could continue their journey into
Germany.
We
also saw the Czech Terezin family camp
which Shalmi had spoken to us about in Terezin. The Czech Jews had been
transported to Auschwitz to reduce the overcrowding prior to the Red Cross
visit as part of the beautification project. Once the visit had occurred,
however, the Czech camp was liquidated and all of its inmates sent to the gas
chambers.
Passing a large pool of
water, Shalmi told us it was one of two such pools, required by the Swiss
insurance company, Allianz, before it would agree to insure Auschwitz-Birkenau.
This factory of death was insured against damage by fire.
Next Shalmi spoke of the
importance of “The Ramp” where the selection process was made determining
whether one was to live or die. He told
us several emotional stories shared with him as he chronicled survivor
testimony, in which they described their experiences on The Ramp. He told us many survivors often speak of
their life “before the ramp” and their “life after the ramp.”
We
saw the remains of the crematoria which had been destroyed by the Nazis before
fleeing. Shalmi drew our attention to
one beam. The Nazis hired professionals
to do their construction. This architect knew he was creating a
crematorium. It wasn’t enough to make
straight, simple lines - he put
moldings on the beam to make it more beautiful.
He was concerned with aesthetics as he was making a chamber of
death.
The
'sauna' served as the building where those who had been chosen to live were
processed (uniforms, tattooed, shaved) and we walked through the processing
rooms, and spent some time looking at the photographs displayed which had been
found in peoples’ suitcases. We also
viewed the remains of the warehouses called Canada which were massive storage
buildings which housed confiscated Jewish property taken at the ramp,
Shalmi
had started our visit with some observations about human behavior. Throughout the day he had made some
additional observations. He had told us
of people such as Dora, a woman in charge of the women’s camp who had
originally been imprisoned as a communist and could have obtained early release
but would not inform on her fellow communists, but then here, became a cold,
harsh, unfeeling matron of the camp. “We
should all be afraid of what we can do under certain circumstances”, he said. “Some people descend to the level of
beasts, others rise to the level of angels.
And you ask, ‘Who are those human beings. Is this a man?’”
