It's January 13th and I'm finally finishing up our blog with our final stop on our trip through Europe... Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. You can understand my reasoning for delaying this as much as possible... It was a stop that we both knew we were going to do because it something I knew I wanted to do when we booked our flights in August. So we booked our flight home out of Warsaw because of it, but we still weren't really sure whether or not to be excited about it or not. I've always enjoyed learning about WWII history, and I think part of the reason that I enjoy it is that it baffles me that things like this happen. And I know people online (as well as our tour guide) make a comparison to slavery in the U.S., there is no comparison to what the Nazis did to millions of people in a matter of about 4 years. So all in all, I think I was excited for the tour because it was something that I knew I wanted to do if I had the chance, and after I suggested it to Rachel and gave her my reasoning for it I think she felt the same.
When I returned home (I realize I'm jumping way ahead), my friend Lindsay who was in Ireland with me sent me a text specifically about the Auschwitz tour. At the time, I was struggling to figure out how I would describe it. She made it easy for me.
Unreal is probably the perfect word to describe the tour, and probably my only proper usage of the word. Other words I threw around in my head were depressing, unbelievable, historical, amazing, surreal, eye-opening, flat out crazy, humbling, discomforting. The list goes on. It's funny too because the night before the tour, we stayed at a 'hostel-in-progress' in Krakow with a guy we met on the Couchsurfing website. Our bed was a cot and they didn't give us any blankets or pillows or anything. And I'm pretty sure a window was open. In Poland.... on January 2nd... We were cold. We didn't complain very long about it the next day after seeing some of the conditions the camp was run under though. We were allowed to tour a barracks that was initially intended as a stable for about 25 horses in which they'd each have their own stall. Well, it was eventually turned into a barracks where one horse stall housed between 15 and 21 people. What? Yeah. Another side note, these barracks had no toilets in them, prisoners were only allowed to use the one bathroom in the camp twice a day at designated times. Another interesting side note, the plumbing system at Auschwitz was the highest quality plumbing system in Europe at that time in history. Again, what? This was to prevent disease spreading to the camp officers mainly, but just baffling.
Our tour was a two part tour. The Auschwitz and Birkenau camps are two separate camps located about a km from each other. There is also a third camp that was constructed, but there is nothing left there after the Nazis destroyed as much as possible when the Russians started liberating other camps in Poland. The first part of the tour was the original Auschwitz portion, and was mainly indoors. This part was more of a museum-type tour. One of the buildings housed belongings collected from prisoners. This was the definition of unreal. I've never seen so many shoes, combs, toothbrushes, clothing, even hair that was shaved off of the prisoners upon their arrival. The belongings are in big glass cases and are literally just unbelievable. There is a window of suitcases that have people's names on them as well as their birthday, we noticed that some of the suitcases' birthdays were in the 1940's, which would have made those individuals about 70 years old today.
The second part of the tour was the Birkenau camp, which was essentially the death camp. This tour was entirely outdoors besides the brief walk through of the barracks. Like I said previously, the Nazis began destroying as much evidence of the camps as possible upon news of camps being liberated. So the camp consisted of a few surviving barracks, and dozens of brick chimneys that remained after the rest of the barracks burned down. So most of it was just rows of chimneys. Very eerie. It was very uncomfortable seeing pictures of prisoners lined up for the gas chambers standing exactly where we were.
We entered the camp along the railroad tracks which literally ran right through the entrance of the camp, which is the reason that they choose Poland in the first place. Rail system was already in place and trains came to Poland from all over the place, making the transport of the Jews easy. They built the camp around the tracks so that immediately after arrival they would get the people off the train and separate the ones who could work and the one who could not and take those not strong enough straight to the chamber. Our tour guide explained that at least 8 trains a day would arrive at the camp allowing the Nazis to kill hundreds every day. Just horrendous.
Nothing about life in the camp was cheerful. The prisoners got to use the bathroom twice a day in a room complete with a large slab of concrete containing rows of about 30 hollowed out holes for them to sit on and go. No toilet paper. No privacy. Nothing.
We were told that the prisoners debated running or not because trying to escape meant putting friends and family in danger. If one ran three others were killed because of it.
Walking throughout the camp on a cold January day made everything settle in, as much as it could anyways. We grow up learning about the Holocaust in grade school, but I don't think we ever realize just how real it was. Being at Auschwitz was a wake up call to what millions of Jewish and others went through during the Holocaust.
We had the same tour guide throughout both portions of the tour, and she was wonderful. She definitely didn't beat around the bush. And how can you for a subject like this? She was very blunt, and didn't downplay any of the atrocities that occurred during this terrible period in history. 1.1 million people were murdered in this camp from 1941-1945... 1.1 Million. Just hearing that is baffling, and seeing thousands of pairs of shoes really puts something like that into perspective.
- Zach
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