There are some trips one must take if given the opportunity. Despite its dark tone, this was one of them.I woke up relatively early on Sunday morning so I could catch the bus to a town called Oświęcim ("osh-vee-ent-seem"). In 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, this site, which at that time had become German land as part of the invasion, was chosen to set up what would become the largest of the concentration and extermination camps. The Germans "germanised" the name to Auschwitz.
I sprinted to the bus station hoping to catch the 9:30 bus to Oświęcim, as it is about an hour from Kraków, and the Auschwitz museum is only open until 3:00pm in the winter months. I was told to allow several hours to see the place. I managed to catch the bus and was once again travelling through the Polish countryside. In the daylight I could now see the terrain and the
Sudeten Mountains in the distance. There were many farms along the road, with chickens feeding in the front yards. Every once in a while we would pass a statue of the Virgin Mary or a crucifix - a reflection of the religious devotion in this country that is nearly ninety percent Roman Catholic.
I was relying on the
Lonely Planet book I had borrowed from the library in Nottingham to tell me where to get off the bus. Luckily it was accurate and the signage in the town was quite thorough. I walked toward the museum. The weather was cool and cloudy.
Auschwitz is actually three camps. The one known as Auschwitz is the most intact, as it was simply abandoned by the Nazis when Poland was liberated by the Russians in 1945. The second, the largest of the three, is Birkenau or Auschwitz II, most of which was destroyed by the fleeing Nazis trying in vain to destroy the evidence of their genocidal activities. It lies about three kilometres from the original camp. The third is Monowitz or Auschwitz III, where all the factories were located. It is a few kilometres in the other direction from Auschwitz I, but is not part of the museum.
Once in the museum I grabbed a map and paid 26 zł ($8.50) for the English tour at 11:00am. Admission to the sites are free. It's only the tours that one must pay for (to employ the guides and pay for upkeep of the museum itself). It would be rather disgusting for anyone to profit from a place like this. The tour started with a fifteen minute video about Auschwitz. It wasn't anything really new. It showed some of the horrific images we've all seen before in news reel footage after the Allied liberation.
From there Iwona, our guide took us through the camp. There was definitely a very sombre mood all around. Many of the people walking around had wet faces and tissues in hand. We walked by the famous (infamous really) gate with the cynical "Arbeit Macht Frei" above it, German for "work makes you free" before walking toward the first gas chamber. The camp is surrounded by two layers of electrified barbed-wire fencing with concrete posts. Just outside that boundary is a small flat-roofed building with a large chimney. This was the provisional gas chamber where the first mass exterminations took place. There are signs when you enter to show respect and keep silent. The gas chamber itself is simply an empty concrete room. There are square holes in the ceiling where the Cyclone B gas was dropped in. People standing near the openings died instantly. Those farthest away died in about twenty minutes. About 10,000 people died in that room, before the larger facilities at Birkenau were constructed.
The room next to it contained the ovens. Because the Nazis removed the ovens and dismantled them, they were reassembled and returned to their original spot. People have placed flowers in the gas chamber and on the ovens. It was quite a moving sight. Outside the weather was getting greyer, appropriately enough.
The commander of the camp, Rudolph Höss, lived in a large house just down the road from the gas chamber. While his children played in the yard and his orchestra played in his salon, people were being led to their death a few hundred metres away. It was a horrifying thought. Between the two points there stands a small gallows, where after the Nuremburg trials, Rudolph Höss was hanged for his part in the operation.
We then moved into the blocks of the camp. The camp was originally a barracks for Polish soldiers before the Nazi occupation, so it looked as one would expect. The blocks were three storey brick buildings with large open rooms and corridors down the centre. The buildings face each other along treed streets. In some of the blocks, exhibitions have been set up to show what went on there. There are various themes: living conditions, extermination, a tribute to the Jews, etc. There are many artefacts collected by the liberators, much of which were the confiscated personal belongings of the prisoners. There was one entire room of shoes piled to the ceiling, all sizes and forms. Others had brushes, bags, eyeglasses, artificial limbs, and perhaps most disturbing of all, hair. After the mass exterminations, women's hair was cut of and used in textiles.
Perhaps the most chilling spot, next to the gas chamber, was the death block. This was two buildings joined by a yard. In one building many of the medical experiments took place and the second building was used as a holding cell for political prisoners, who were of course all eventually executed after a "trial" by the SS. In the yard between there is a reconstructed wall, where prisoners were shot at close range. There are flowers strewn along this wall. It was at this point in the tour that it began to rain quite hard. Again this seemed fitting. I had no umbrella and did not feel the need for one.
Inside the death block there were cells of all sizes. The smallest were the standing cells. They were simply bricked-in areas with a small door at the bottom. Prisoners had to stand sometimes for days in these cells until they collapsed from exhaustion. Another cell had a steel cover over the vent, so the prisoner would suffocate. There were inscriptions of the walls from the prisoners.
The tour continued to the roll call square before heading back through the gates. A shuttle bus took us to the Birkenau camp, which is unbelievably expansive. Only about ninety-five of the three hundred buildings that were there are intact. The main gatehouse has a railroad track running under it that extends to the end of the camp. This is where the prisoners, mostly Jews were unloaded and selected. Those that were able-bodied were sent to the barracks and those that were not, especially the elderly and the very young were sent directly to the gas chamber. The gas chambers were at the end of the rail line. Today they are heaps of rubble, as they were exploded in the final days of the camp. Ruins of the barracks are also scattered across the camp. A memorial to those who died there, about one and a half million, was built in the 1960s.
At Birkenau the sun came out. I really couldn't have asked for a better weather arc for a trip to such a grim place: cold, rainy and then sunny. It more or less reflects the story of the camps. I spent some time walking around the camp but I didn't get to see it all, as 3:00pm was fast approaching and the last shuttle back to the Auschwitz museum was leaving. At one point I was alone in one of the brick sleeping quarters. The bunks and ladders are still intact. The prisoners were sometimes forced to sleep five or more in each bunk. On the walls, there were painted more cynical slogans like "Sei Ruhig," which means "be calm."
I caught the slow bus back to Kraków, which took about two hours, as it went along a rural route and stopped a couple dozen times along the way. Leaving Oświęcim we passed Monowitz, a collection of factories, run-down and surrounded by the same concrete-posted barbed wire as its counterparts. There were also guard towers along the route. Despite seeing it all, and seeing it depicted in movies about the War, it's hard to imagine how this town (population 48,000) which seems so normal now, has been through so much.
I was back in Kraków for my last night in Poland. Despite the greyness of the day's visit, I was determined not to let it get me down. The next post will finish off the series on Poland.
Peace.
