There’s little that can be said about Auschwitz that will surprise people. Most Western cultures do a pretty good job of making us understand what happened in the Holocaust and Auschwitz is at the center of that. Rather than making this post a virtual tour of the site, I think I’ll just share some of the most striking things that stood out to me.
Camp Structure
Auschwitz-Birkenau is divided into three separate camps. The first two are the famous ones. Camp I was originally a military barracks of the Polish Army. Once Poland was conquered, the “elite” of the population were arrested and moved into jails and prisons. Once those filled up, a new location was needed. The military barracks in Oswiecim were converted into an isolation area and the name of the city was Germanized. Over time, the camp began to be used for experiments in extermination. It’s where Zyklon B was first perfected for gassing. Prior to the gas chambers, starvation and shooting were the primary methods of mass killing. Prisoners were also subject to harsh forced labor, just as in the other camps.
As shipments of people increased, a second camp was built to scale up murder. Auschwitz-Birkenau II is where the infamous train tracks lie and where the bulk of the gassing and cremating was done. People were offloaded from trains, sorted, and either sent into one of the 300 slave workers’ barracks or sent to die. Camp II is absolutely massive. The entire camp spans over 400 acres of land and was in the process of being expanded when the Soviets liberated it.
Pursuit of freedom
The purpose and danger of the camps was well-known throughout Poland. The Germans weren’t just killing Jews, they wanted the Slavic people of the entire nation gone too. With such a widespread objective, the Polish public was quite ready to help their neighbors. As such, any escapees were able to find assistance from homesteads very quickly after they made a run for it. Security was extremely tight, but over 900 prisoners attempted to escape during the 5 operational years of the camps. At least 200 were successful.
Suicide was less common than you might assume. It happened daily for sure, but the rates were rather low for a collection of 200,000 prisoners. It most often occurred in the evenings of particularly hard days, when victims couldn’t bear the thought of another. Perhaps it’s just our instinct, but humans have a strong tendency to be resilient. To want to live. Many of the survivors just thought of making it one more hour, one more day, until they were finally free.
The camps did have an organized resistance too. The Sonderkommandos were the groups of prisoners responsible for operating the gas chambers and crematories. While they themselves worried they would be perceived as collaborators, other survivors have laid very little guilt on them. After all, when your options are to die or work, you might as well work if the work will carry on with or without you. Anyways, the Sonderkommandos were often more well-informed than the other prisoners. When shipments of victims from Romania, Latvia, and Estonia stopped coming, they knew the Soviet army was closing in. They gathered explosives and soon set off a bomb in one of the gas chamber buildings, completely destroying the structure to make it useless. All of the conspirators were hunted down and killed, as well at 1 in 3 other Sonderkommandos in retaliation.
Hiding the crimes
As the Soviets drew near, the SS tried to cover up any evidence of the atrocities they committed. What little paper and material records they had were burned. The gas chamber buildings were all exploded. The Sonderkommandos were killed for what they knew. Fortunately, many of them were able to hide amongst the masses in the chaos by changing uniforms. It is mostly from the testimonies of those that blended in and survived that we know how the entire killing process worked.
Imagining the scale
Despite seeing the size of the camps, it was practically impossible for me to imagine the scale of the murders that happened there. Nearly 1.5 million people were killed in these two camps. I just can’t even imagine it. Even standing in the last remaining gas chamber at Camp I, I could not picture the tens of thousands of people that died in that room. However, I can say that the atmosphere definitely felt heavy in the places where the masses died. I know that might just be psychological, but I really do believe that that much death happening in one location just leaves an impact. I don’t know. Whatever the truth is, it’s worth knowing what happened there.
A side note about the gas chamber: it only survived destruction from the retreating SS because it was acting as the camp air raid shelter in the weeks leading up to the liberation. I found it ironic that the place of demise for so many was being used to save those that killed. Kind of odd that that’s the only reason we can still see it today.
Seeing inside the bunkhouses at Camp II gave me a bit better idea of how massive the camp was. 700-800 people were housed in just one of these buildings. Given that there were 250 buildings identical to this one, there were a lot of forced laborers. Still, the scale of a single building, I could see. Imagining 250 of them across the camp, way too big for my imagination. (Most of the wooden barracks are gone today.)
Perhaps the room that helped me imagine the scale of death the best was the room of shoes. At around 100 feet in length, both sides of the corridor were filled from floor to ceiling with shoes. Placards stated that the museum only has 100,000 shoes in the collection. The fact that the evidence of 50,000 lives lost stood before my eyes just broke me. To think that that was just a small drop in the sea of 1.5 million was again, incomprehensible. How could this happen? How can people look at children at believe that they need to be exterminated? How could they stomach these piles of shoes?
I worry about the issue of scale being a barrier for our collective memory. If we can’t even comprehend the level of death of the Holocaust, can we really remember how awful it was? Just trying to analogize for my own understanding — 6 million dollars would completely change my life. Has 6 million lives really changed the world?
They remember
The entire memorial site is covered with photo placards in the very locations where they were taken. The three in the photo below were taken secretly by a prisoner and passed along to the Polish resistance as evidence of what was happening there.
What stuck out to me was the trees in this location. Our tour guide said that they had not planted new trees since WWII. These trees saw what happened. They remember the bodies being burned.
Preservation
The foundation for the museum is very focused on preserving the camps in their original states for as long as possible. It was very interesting and inspiring to see the efforts they’re taking to make sure future generations get to experience Auschwitz. All around, support columns were holding up old structures and evening rubble piles. When buildings need to be restained or reinforced, a semi-permanent structure is built around them so that preservative work can be done. I’m grateful that so many people care so much about preservation to continue this work.
Remembering the people
An ongoing project of the foundation is to list every name of every victim of the Holocaust. This grows harder as time goes on, but 4 million out of the 6 million Jews have been identified. This massive book of names was created to allow visitors to look up known or unknown victims. I had a few minutes to look up Classens. Several of them came from the Netherlands and Ukraine, where my ancestors are from. Though they’re far too distant to call family, it was grounding to see names of people that I might share ancestors with. Schroeder had many listings too. Sadly, I didn’t have time to look for Hamms or Vogts or Janzens.
What now?
Auschwitz has been something I’ve wanted to see for a long time. I wanted to really feel the Holocaust. It certainly left an impact, but I didn’t have the big emotional breakdown that I expected. After today, I think that’s fairly normal. But it did beg a question in me: what now? What do I do with this experience? If we can learn about the Holocaust and the need to not repeat it wherever we live, why preserve the camps? If there isn’t a big emotional breakthrough, why visit?
I don’t have a firm answer to any of those questions. At this point in time, my mind goes back to the quote from Eisenhower that I shared a couple of weeks ago.
“Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses -because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”
The preservation of the camps is evidence of what humans can do without God’s love. Without His guidance, without His grace, without His love burning within us, this is what we can do. How many times have we done this before and no record was kept?
As for what to do with this experience, I truly don’t know yet. I know there is genocide happening today. The Islamic population of China is being consolidated and exterminated, just like the Jews 80 years ago. But what can I do about that? Or am I meant to learn or do something else for someone else somewhere else? It’s something I’ll have to ponder and pray about. What I can’t do is nothing.