Auschwitz






 On Sunday, July 4 I visited the remains of Auschwitz I and II. Both are well-preserved, even though the Nazis tried to cover up all traces of their enormous crimes. I didn't sleep well the night before, because I can't understand a word of Polish and was worried I would fail to catch the early train. Auschwitz has become a huge tourist destination, attracting at least 1.3 million people in 2009. Because it's so busy, the museum now refuses to admit anyone without a reservation after 10:00. I wanted to explore the camps at my own pace (which was certainly the right choice) and planned to arrive the moment the museum opened in the morning.
There's a train that leaves once or twice each hour from Krakow main railway station. It's a slow ride, so I had to board the 6:10 train. I'm relieved that I did, because by 10:00, when I finished the first part of my tour in Auschwitz I, there were a dozen busses lined up and groups kicking off at 10-yard intervals to walk the camp. When I was there it was quiet and uncrowded, so I didn't have to compete with other people. The same was true for Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

Click to see this up close. The guard post is eerie.

I expected empty, delapidated buildings, but at Auschwitz I (a former Polish Army barracks) the buildings are almost all stone and in perfect condition. In some cases, you can make out names or images that inmates scratched into the walls. There is faded German signage and the original paint still shows. [For example, above is the central square of Auschwitz I--the base of the guard house has been playfully painted to look as though it has stones set in it.] Important locations are clearly marked and often an illustration (by a former inmate) accompianies each explanation. The museum is located in a series of buildings or “Blocks”. There is no “fat” in the main exhibition which is housed in Blocks 4-7 and 11--the “Death Block”. Althogether the remnants are a damning collection of evidence and present a compelling argument against faith in human goodness and historical progress. Simply put, it's horrifying and demoralizing.

I couldn't photograph any of the exhibits in the Blocks, which is just as well. It wouldn't do the place justice and it seemed inappropriate anyway. Block 4 established a basic history and explained the purpose of the camp. Sometimes, the layout of each Block is unclear, and I believe I skipped a few exhibit rooms. For example, I realized late that I missed the upper floor exhibit on the "hospital" and SS medical experiments.

This is what the Soviets found.

I also almost missed room 5 in Block 4. The room holds a single exhibit: a sea of women's hair. Sometimes braided.

The scope of the orchestrated cruelty at Auschwitz is hard to accept. I can't stop thinking about the hair. As I walked the rest of the museum, and then the grounds of the Vernichtungslager at Birkenau, the accumulated weight of human suffering and the calculated cruelty of the perpetrators was tangible. The Death Block is an absolute torture chamber. And there are pools next to the crematoria where the Nazis dumped the ashes of their victims. Outside of the camp walls, there are acres of soil saturated with ash.

Above is one of the few clandestine photos showing the process of extermination at Auschwitz. Prisoners are burning bodies in giant pits outside the wire of the camp. In the summer of '44, the crematoria couldn't keep up with the gas chambers.

This is what the same spot looks like today.

The SS dynamited the crematoria when they fled. This is Crematoria IV. The ash pond is to its right in the photo below:

At the same location, we see a group of Hungarian Jews in the summer of '44. They are standing in the vicinity of Crematoria IV and V and waiting to be gassed (they would be in the stand of trees you see behind the foundations of the destroyed Crematoria) . All children were sent directly to the gas along with their mothers. There was no need to shave their heads until after they were dead. That task would fall to the Jewish Sonderkommando.

The monument at Birkenau is huge, and I admit I never appreciated it before (as though it were my place to judge the choices of the generation who lived it). The abstract sculpture, unveiled in 1967, always struck me as the product of a modernist impulse that I found sterile and obtuse.

When I saw it up close and in context, however, I changed my mind. It is an attempt to commemorate, define, and make a collective statement about a place that reflects the greatest imaginable barbarism. In multiple languages, at the foot of a line of abstract shapes, are a series of plaques. Each says the following: “Forever let this place be a cry of dispair and a warning to humanity where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children mainly Jews from various countries of Europe”. It was very moving.

I walked the extermination camp for about an hour. It was only busy toward the end of my stay, when the mobs from the museum arrived by shuttle. I walked past at least five student groups as I returned to the parking lot. Students from Israel had their arms around one another. Students from America seemed distracted by the heat.