Auschwitz

.....murder on an industrial scale.....

I didn’t really want to go to Auschwitz. I’d done Belsen in Germany twice before and had seen the grizzly photographs of piles of waif-like bodies in huge burial piles waiting for the lime. I’d experienced the deafening silence that accompanies a lack of bird song as I wandered around the large grass covered mounds that had now been neatly arranged, covering the thousands of bodies which lay there. I’d had that horror, and like being at the scene of a car crash, once you’ve been there you really don’t feel the need to experience it again; and in any case, surely depravity only goes so deep? But C insisted.

We were fortunate in that on arrival at Auschwitz I (did you know there were three?) we were encouraged by friendly neighbouring Swedish campervaners first to visit Auschwitz II (nee Birkenau), otherwise we would have to be ‘guided’ around the original site. This would be both time-consuming and a little expensive. So we headed off for Auschwitz II on our bikes, about a two mile ride away.

The three concentration camps started life as single entity based on a straightforward Polish Barracks; a small collection of closely grouped two-storey brick buildings complete with a parade square. The barracks was requisitioned in 1940 by the German Army to hold Polish prisoners, mainly because the Polish jails were so overcrowded with dissidents. The small town of Oświęcim was chosen because it was already a major railhead for coal and salt, and was discrete enough to enable the Germans to go about the business of incarceration and brutality without causing a stir. The Nazis immediately ordered the evacuation of most of the town, renamed it Auschwitz, and set themselves up for a bit of fun – the first prisoners to arrive were 728 Poles in June 1940.

Birkenau came into existence in 1941 when Auschwitz I became overcrowded and the Germans were struggling with the numbers of prisoners of all nationalities, particularly the burgeoning group of Jews from throughout Poland, that needed to be locked up. Bigger the problem – bigger the hammer.

I sensed this would be a different experience as we approached Birkenau on that grey,

a glimpse of the horror.......

overcast day. Still out of site I got a whiff of burning rubber, and then woodsmoke. In the distance against a heavy sky, a reddy-grey Polish industrial chimney added to the cloud base with some of its own steam. Then to my right, a couple of hundred metres away, I caught a glimpse of the dark wooden apexes of a couple of watchtowers. And, almost immediately, there was a gap in the hedgerow. Birkenau’s red-brick central tower with its infamous railway tunnel arch, flanked by tiled, almost village station like, brick outbuildings came into view. I had to stop and take in the view. Whilst there was plenty of stuff happening either side, it was the three-storey central tower, with its completely windowed third floor under a dark tiled pointy-hat roof, straddling the expectant archway, that drew your view. I had seen it many times before in film and photograph. However it was extraordinarily unreal in real life. I knew that once through the tunnel (colloquially known as ‘The Gate of Death), the percentages were wildly against you ever getting out alive; seeing it in the flesh, so to speak, was chilling.

From the third floor of the central tower you get a real sense of the scale of Birkenau. Best described as about as big as a medium-sized airfield, it stretches on interminably. Surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences (thankfully no longer switched on) a good deal of the camp has been left as was. Out of the 300 regularly placed cell buildings, nearly all of the 45 brick built ones remain intact. Only 22 of the wooden ones are still standing. The remainder, however, are clearly defined by their foundations and two red-brick chimneys which sat at either end and, when lit, provided heating for the inmates. The scene is as remarkable as it is abhorrent. I have tried excruciatingly hard to think of an appropriate simile for the view that these pathetic, lonely chimneys, in endless rows upon rows, portray. But I can’t. The best I can do is to offer a new simile: like the chimneys of Birkenau. I can’t think when one might use this, and to what unthinkable scene it might help describe, but that’s the scale of the horror.

Birkenau maxed at 100,000 prisoners in August 1944. Exact figures end up being meaningless, but over 1 million prisoners died or were executed (they use the term ‘murdered’ a lot in the accompanying literature) at Birkenau. Most of these were Jews – but there were thousands of Gypsies, political prisoners and homosexuals, among others, who suffered alongside the Jews, making it the most prolific concentration camp run by the Nazis. This is a scale that is difficult to fathom until you stand in that watch tower. Stretching out in front of you is the human equivalent of an industrial-sized chicken farm. Even the buildings are remarkable facsimiles of battery chicken coups, elongated wooden single storey affairs with low pitched roofs. Inside it’s the same. Triple wooden bunks squashed side-by-side housed 300 prisoners at a time (where the original buildings, Polish Army stables, were designed for 50 horses). No, 1 million is easy to imagine from that tower. The only reason they couldn’t seem to kill more was they couldn’t gas them fast enough. Technology and scale defeated their ambition.

It took us two and a half hours to walk round about half of the site. There’s not much more to say. The site is really well done and every 100 yards or so there’s a photo-board with notes in English. The centre of the site is bisected by the railway line which enters, ominously, as a single track, but splits into three at the sidings. The sidings stretch for around a quarter of a mile and allow for disgorgement of the victims on both sides. Here prisoners were selected for work, medical experiment or extermination. Pregnant women went straight to the gas chamber.

The chambers were located at the end of the site. They were demolished by the Nazis in 1944 just prior to the arrival of the Russians when, spinelessly, the Nazis marched tens of thousands of prisoners westwards to camps which were closer to the Fatherland. Countless more died on these marches. But the gassing process is explained by photo-board in detail. Hundreds of prisoners were ordered into an underground chamber (underground to prevent the leakage of gas) where they were ordered to undress. They were then hoarded into the gas chamber; at which point canisters of Cyclon B (a highly dangerous pesticide) were then dropped through openings in the roof; result: death. After a period of time to allow the gas to become inert, the bodies were manhandled into the adjoining furnace where the bodies were burnt. Simple and effective.

I stood among the rubble of one of the gas chambers and found myself unmoved; I had

a cattle truck but for supposed lesser mortals......

moved about as far as I could go already. However, for me the most harrowing thing about that end of the camp was a blurred photograph board of two naked women almost running from the holding area to the chambers. Why? What had they been told? Did they know their fate and want to get it over with? Or were they just afraid of the guard dogs which had kept them in check prior to their death? Second up there was the brief description of one small block were Dr Mengeles conducted his medical experiments on, among others, twins. No imagination is required to picture the scene with ‘Dr Death’, as he was known, stepping out of the room to fire up the X-ray machine on an unsuspecting inmate in an experiment to see the dosage required for sterilisation. I cannot bring myself to think of other experiments he conducted, but there is enough literature describing the horror kicking around if you’re interested.

The rest of Birkenau was a bit of a blur. And by the time we returned to the gatehouse I was relieved to get back on my bike. On the way back to Auschwitz I we stopped at the original railhead where a lone railway carriage stood as a further memorial to the dead. In the distance you could still make out the gatehouse. Looking between the two I began to lose the clarity of which I had seen things from the tower. It had all became unreal again – and I was thankful of it. However, little did I know that my horror would be brought back into sharp relief during a short visit to Auschwitz I about an hour later.

Auschwitz I is a sideshow to Birkenau. Sure it’s where it all began at Oświęcim, including the use of gas to kill inmates. But it lacks the scale and intensity of Birkenau. Also Birkenau is also less ‘touristy’. Cars and buses park haphazardly in a makeshift car park outside of the gatehouse, and there is only a very small presence of authority on the site. Auschwitz I is more ordered. You have to take a guide (at a cost) between 10am and 3pm. There are a number of souvenir shops and some tacky restaurants across from the entrance. It’s busy and noisy, and lacks the solitude and sombreness of Birkenau. But it is remarkably intact, including electrified fences, and, should you wish, you can stand in a preserved gas chamber and stare up at the hole in the ceiling where the gas canisters were dropped in.

But, for me, what Auschwitz I gives that Birkenau doesn’t is a set of small museums within the barrack rooms depicting life for the inmates at that time and other related displays. And the building entitled ‘Material Evidence of Crimes’ shook me to my core. In this building, artfully displayed, are enormous (50 foot long and 10 foot high) glass cabinets which take up a complete wall. In these cabinets there are thousands of similar possessions, those not reused by the Nazis, collected from the sites. The one containing women’s hair seemed laughably unreal – although the process of taking the hair and making cloth, which was also displayed, delivered some reality to the associated display. The one containing black shoes was horrible. The one with old leather suitcases, labelled with the traveller’s name, was despicable. Really, really unpalatable. There must have been five or six thousand tired and worn brown leather cases, most stencilled or hand inscribed with the owner’s name. Clearly they were empty, robbed of their possessions. It was tearfully pitiful. If there’s a single visual metaphor that best describes the horrors of Auschwitz, for me, this is it.

Finally there was a small cabinet containing infants’ shoes – clearly small feet do not take up much room. I couldn’t bear to look at that.

No amplification required.

And finally, and I am running out of steam writing this, were national sponsored displays to commemorate the loss to specific countries. We did a few, but took the recommendation not to miss the Dutch floor. It was extremely tastefully done and, from room to room, you were taken on a journey depicting the bullying, arrest, incarceration and then death of Dutch Jews. Anne Frank is detailed here, but her story does not overwhelm the display. The final room has a single wall with tens of thousands of names, dates and places of birth on it. The names are too small to read without getting close but, for C, it was the most moving display. Of note, there were known to be 140,000 Jews in Holland before the war. There were only 5,000 left by the end. If you want some detail, I think that says it all.