Not Quite The Trip We Had Planned, Part 3: Auschwitz
One of the reasons I had always wanted to visit Poland was to see Auschwitz for myself. Dark tourism may be depressing, but I’m absolutely fascinated by the psyche of people who commit atrocities and it doesn’t get any more heinous than the minds behind the greatest mass genocide in human history. What is even more incredible is that the Holocaust was recent enough that there are still survivors alive who can speak of the events firsthand, one of whom is filmmaker and convicted paedophile Roman Polanski. Most people have at least a rough idea of what took place in Auschwitz, although there are some who deny the events for some reason, but it’s only when you look at even just the basic figures that you can understand the true scope of the horrors that were orchestrated by the Nazis:
The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. The murders were carried out primarily through mass shootings and poison gas in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland.
Now the day to see the most infamous concentration camps for ourselves was here.
Tuesday, May 7, 2024
It would be about a 90-minute drive to get to Auschwitz for our midday tour, our companions en route being a British couple in their 60s and a really sweet German woman who told us she was 82 years old and that her father had been an SS guard so she wanted to see for herself that for which he had had some involvement.
When we arrived we were taken into a hall to collect our tickets and headphones for the audio portion of the tour and it was hard to believe how many people were there on a Tuesday afternoon, I can’t even imagine what it must be like on a weekend. More people joined our group and our tour guide led us down a long outdoor corridor to a waiting area, however, it was slowly becoming a little difficult for the older lady in our group, but fortunately there was an exceptionally loud, obnoxious American man to help. “Somebody find this woman a wheelchair!”, he shouted and by sheer chance there was a young British woman with us who was a sprinter so she ran back to the lobby to get the chair, while he reassured our octogenarian friend at the top of his voice while holding her shoulders. “You got this! Breath, just breath, you got this!” he bellowed while she just smiled and nodded, but I’m pretty certain she wanted to let him know that, although she has a little trouble walking long distances, she wasn’t actually dying, however, I think she just held her tongue instead.
There were to be two stops on our tour so when the wheelchair arrived we were ushered by our guide through the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Sets You Free) gate of Auschwitz I, the main camp and administrative complex. Our tour guide wasn’t a particularly cheerful woman, but I guess it’s probably difficult to be lighthearted and upbeat when describing in great detail the most miserable place on earth to groups of people who get more and more depressed the longer they are there, every single day.
We had now entered Auschwitz I and this was our first impression looking around the grounds with some of its 22 buildings. The building with the three arches is now the visitors reception centre and museum, but was originally the prisoner reception centre where the deportees were tattooed, shaved, disinfected, and given a striped prison uniform if they hadn’t been immediately taken to the gas chamber upon arrival. The grass area near the entrance was the killing field where thousands of prisoners were shot:
The first stop was entering the museum building with photos of those deported there plus signs depicting statistics and demographics. Rather than post photos of the signs, here is what was written verbatim:
KL Auschwitz was the largest Nazi German concentration camp and since 1942 also mass extermination centre for Jews.
In the years 1940-1945, the Nazis deported at least 1,300,000 people to Auschwitz:
- 1,100,000 Jews
- 140,000 – 150,000 Poles
- 23,000 Roma/Gypsies
- 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war
- 25,000 prisoners from other ethnic groups
1,100,000 of these people died in Auschwitz, approximately 90% of victims were Jews. The SS murdered the majority of them in the gas chambers.
June 1940
Beginning of deportation of Poles. The Nazis sent 140,000-150,000 Polish prisoners to the camp, where half of them perished.June 1941
Beginning of deportations of 25,000 prisoners of various nationalities. About half of them perished in the camp.Summer 1941
Beginning of Soviet POWs. Most died during their imprisonment, only a few survived.March 1942
Beginning of deportations of one million jews. Auschwitz started fulfilling two functions; whilst remaining a concentration camp, it became yet another site of the Holocaust, the biggest mass murder in the history of mankind, perpetuated by the Nazis. About one million deported Jews were murdered by the SS, mainly in gas chambers.February 1943
Beginning of deportations of 23,000 roma (gypsies). Of this number, 21,000 perished.
Estimated number of Jews deported to Auschwitz:
430,000 from Hungary
300,000 from Poland
69,000 from France
60,000 from The Netherlands
55,000 from Greece
46,000 from The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
27,000 from Slovakia
25,000 from Belgium
23,000 from Austria and Germany
10,000 from Yugoslavia
7,500 from Italy
690 from Norway
Plus approximately 34,000 Jewish individuals transferred from other concentration camps.
In the same area were 3-D models and miniature recreations of different areas of the camp and then we moved on into the displays. One of the first sights was a tray of Zyklon B pellets, the product used in the gas chambers, as well as countless empty canisters. After that it was roomfuls of possessions of the prisoners that were confiscated by the Nazis of which photos can’t capture the sheer enormity; separate rooms full of eyeglasses, crutches and other medical equipment, cups and bowls, shoes, and suitcases, with a special emphasis on those belonging to children. There was also a gigantic room full of compacted human hair, but out of respect for the dead, photography of it was not permitted.
Pictures don’t even begin to do the displays justice and with the exception of the Zyklon B canisters, similar photos of the same objects such as shoes and luggage are just taken from different areas of the same enormous display rooms:
From the museum we were taken past the Hospital of Block 10 where some heinous medical experiments, particularly of the sterilisation variety on women, were conducted to Block 11, commonly known as the ‘Death Block’:
Block 11 was the name of a brick building in Auschwitz I, the Stammlager or main camp of the Auschwitz concentration camp network. This block was used for executions and torture. Between Block 10 and Block 11 stood the “Death Wall” (reconstructed after the war) where thousands of prisoners were lined up for execution by firing squad.
The block contained special torture chambers in which various punishments were applied to prisoners. Some could include being locked in a dark chamber for several days or being forced to stand in one of four standing cells called “Stehzelle” in German. Punishment in these special compartments (one square metre each, with a hole 5×5 cm for breathing), consisted of confining four prisoners, who were forced by the lack of space to remain standing all night for up to twenty nights, while still being forced to work during the day.
It was at Block 11 that the first attempts to kill people with Zyklon B were implemented in September 1941.
There were two floors and a basement to Block 11 so we were taken first through the ground floor and the first room we encountered was the SS duty room, opposite which was a tiny Gestapo courtroom consisting of a small desk as well as a long table with seven seats for the Gestapo and just two chairs for prisoners, the most common sentence handed down being execution by firing squad at the Death Wall. There were several more rooms where prisoners were held, some rooms with bunks, others just blankets on the floor, and next to these were the washrooms where condemned prisoners were stripped before their execution, however, some apparently were just shot in the washroom itself. We also had a short look around some of the displays on the second floor, me wanting to help the elderly lady up the stairs, but she was content just waiting for us to come back down.
Next we were led into the basement which was all punishment cells, including the aforementioned standing cells, plus a cell for prisoners sentenced to death by starvation, and another washroom for those facing the firing squad. Once finished in the basement we exited and were shown a small flight of stairs that led directly to the reconstruction of the Death Wall.
The walk to Block 11, through the ground floor and basement, and then out to the Death Wall. Included is the sign mapping out the floors:
Now that we had seen the Death Block we continued on past the location the largest public execution at Auschwitz, this time by hanging, and were soon at the reconstruction of crematorium I, fittingly also the location where Rudolph Höss, commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, was hanged after his war crimes trial at the request of surviving former camp prisoners. Crematorium I was the location of the first purpose-built gas chamber in Auschwitz:
The first gassings at Auschwitz took place on September 3, 1941, when around 850 inmates—Soviet prisoners of war and sick Polish inmates—were killed with Zyklon B in the basement of block 11 in Auschwitz I. The building proved unsuitable, so gassings were conducted instead in crematorium I, also in Auschwitz I, which operated until December 1942. There, more than 700 victims could be killed at once. Tens of thousands were killed in crematorium I. To keep the victims calm, they were told they were to undergo disinfection and de-lousing; they were ordered to undress outside, then were locked in the building and gassed. After its decommissioning as a gas chamber, the building was converted to a storage facility and later served as an SS air raid shelter. The gas chamber and crematorium were reconstructed after the war. Dwork and [Robert-Jan] van Pelt write that a chimney was recreated; four openings in the roof were installed to show where the Zyklon B had entered; and two of the three furnaces were rebuilt with the original components.
Entering the gas chamber and crematorium, even if it had been rebuilt, was a little heavy:
Crematorium I wrapped up our tour of Auschwitz I so we boarded our minibus once and took the ride to the second stop, Auschwitz II-Birkenau:
After visiting Auschwitz I in March 1941, it appears that [Heinrich] Himmler ordered that the camp be expanded, although Peter Hayes notes that, on 10 January 1941, the Polish underground told the Polish government-in-exile in London: “the Auschwitz concentration camp …can accommodate approximately 7,000 prisoners at present, and is to be rebuilt to hold approximately 30,000.” Construction of Auschwitz II-Birkenau—called a Kriegsgefangenenlager (prisoner-of-war camp) on blueprints—began in October 1941 in Brzezinka, about three kilometers from Auschwitz I. The initial plan was that Auschwitz II would consist of four sectors (Bauabschnitte I–IV), each consisting of six subcamps (BIIa–BIIf) with their own gates and fences. The first two sectors were completed (sector BI was initially a quarantine camp), but the construction of BIII began in 1943 and stopped in April 1944, and the plan for BIV was abandoned.
As we approached the front gate along the railway tracks we were met with thousands upon thousands of letters, cards, and other tributes left in the stones. Once through we passed old, windowless freight cars used for transporting the condemned as we continued down the tracks, the final destination of many days-long mass deportations by rail for members of the Jewish population from all over Europe.
Not a lot of the original site remains, but this was our first impression of Auschwitz II:
One of the first locations we were taken once inside was the remains of crematoria II:
Plans for crematoria II and III show that both had an oven room 30 by 11.24 m (98.4 by 36.9 ft) on the ground floor, and an underground dressing room 49.43 by 7.93 m (162.2 by 26.0 ft) and gas chamber 30 by 7 m (98 by 23 ft). The dressing rooms had wooden benches along the walls and numbered pegs for clothing. Victims would be led from these rooms to a five-yard-long narrow corridor, which in turn led to a space from which the gas chamber door opened. The chambers were white inside, and nozzles were fixed to the ceiling to resemble showerheads. The daily capacity of the crematoria (how many bodies could be burned in a 24-hour period) was 340 corpses in crematorium I; 1,440 each in crematoria II and III; and 768 each in IV and V. By June 1943 all four crematoria were operational, but crematorium I was not used after July 1943. This made the total daily capacity 4,416, although by loading three to five corpses at a time, the Sonderkommando were able to burn some 8,000 bodies a day. This maximum capacity was rarely needed; the average between 1942 and 1944 was 1,000 bodies burned every day.
The crematoria consisted of a dressing room, gas chamber, and furnace room. In crematoria II and III, the dressing room and gas chamber were underground; in IV and V, they were on the ground floor. There was also a dissection room (Sezierraum). SS officers told the victims they had to take a shower and undergo delousing. The victims undressed in the dressing room and walked into the gas chamber; signs said “Bade” (bath) or “Desinfektionsraum” (disinfection room). A former prisoner testified that the language of the signs changed depending on who was being killed. Some inmates were given soap and a towel. A gas chamber could hold up to 2,000; one former prisoner said it was around 3,000.
The Zyklon B was delivered to the crematoria by a special SS bureau known as the Hygiene Institute. After the doors were shut, SS men dumped in the Zyklon B pellets through vents in the roof or holes in the side of the chamber. The victims were usually dead within 10 minutes; Rudolf Höss testified that it took up to 20 minutes.
If you read all of that, you would have seen a reference to the Sonderkommando burning bodies and might be curious as to who those guys were. Here’s the answer and it’s as grim as you probably would’ve expected at this point:
Sonderkommandos (German: special unit) were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. The death-camp Sonderkommandos, who were always inmates, were unrelated to the SS-Sonderkommandos, which were ad hoc units formed from members of various SS offices between 1938 and 1945.
The original layout and remains of crematoria II:
Besides wandering around and taking in the ruins and scenery, there wasn’t as much to see at Birkenau compared to Auschwitz I so we were now at the final official stop off on our tour, entering some of the original barracks that were still standing:
SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Bischoff, an architect, was the chief of construction. Based on an initial budget of RM 8.9 million, his plans called for each barracks to hold 550 prisoners, but he later changed this to 744 per barracks, which meant the camp could hold 125,000, rather than 97,000. There were 174 barracks, each measuring 35.4 by 11.0 m (116 by 36 ft), divided into 62 bays of 4 m2 (43 sq ft). The bays were divided into “roosts”, initially for three inmates and later for four. With personal space of 1 m2 (11 sq ft) to sleep and place whatever belongings they had, inmates were deprived, Robert-Jan van Pelt wrote, “of the minimum space needed to exist”.
The outside of the barracks, inside with the bays with roosts, the bathrooms, and a infuriatingly tagged by tourists, plus another wooden barracks specifically intended for the murder of women and newborn babies:
This concluded our tour of Auschwitz so we once again entered the minibus and were driven back to Krakow, our elderly attendee saddened, but pleased that she had decided to see it in person and me nodding off on the way back, possibly having a mild seizure while I slept. However, I don’t think it really mattered too much, we all needed a lie down after an experience like that.
It’s heartening to see that visit taken so seriously in a world increasingly filled with shrill deniers. Hope you also got to the Wieliczka Salt Mines. For me, one of the world’s most amazing sites.
Thank you, I really appreciate that. Unfortunately we didn’t get to do the Salt Mines, but hopefully one day.