Auschwitz

Today started early.  We were being picked up for our tour at 7 am so we needed to be up by 6.  It took us about an hour and a half to get to Oswiecim, which is the Polish name for the town that the camps are situated in.  It began snowing as we headed out and there was more snow falling when we arrived.  It kind of contributed to the solemn mood that seemed to pervade the entire place.  I recommend you get there early as by the time we had looked through Auschitz I the large tour groups were there too.  We had six in our group which meant we could go at a more leisurely and reflective pace.

Having visited Dachau a few years ago, I had sort of an idea what to expect, even though the guide there went to great pains to state that Dachau was a concentration camp not an extermination camp and that the showers and ovens weren't used.  It still didn't really prepare me for how the place felt, especially stepping once again through the gates labelled 'Arbeit macht Frei'.  The guide today also stressed that all numbers that we saw were estimates as the only people recorded were the ones that weren't sent to the gas chamber immediately.  The estimate for the number recorded was 30% of all those that went through.  I had heard about the cabinets as well but seeing them with the hair, suitcases, eyeglasses etc was pretty sobering.  We were shown different places including the underground cells and the cell Maximilian Kolbe occupied.  I saw a picture on the wall of someone whose last name was Wisniewski which is a variant of my last name.  While we were inside the weather cleared, it stopped snowing and the sun came out.

Shelter for the SS soldier doing the head count.  We don't want him getting wet or too hot in the sun

After that it was a short car ride to the 20x bigger Auschwitz II-Birkenau site.  This has been left much as the Germans left it when they fled after blowing up the gas chambers and the crematoria.  The train tracks go straight through the main gate and right through to the other side of the compound where the underground gas chambers are.  I estimated it was about a kilometre to walk through the gates to the back of the camp.  It is again a pretty sobering walk and we did it in the sunshine on fresh snow and knew that we were only there for a visit.  The walk went alongside the train tracks and had ditches on either side.  To your right were the remains of the 'newer' wooden barracks, 300 of them by the time the camp was liberated and to your left were kitchens, latrines and more barracks, the ones made of bricks.  All had been built by the prisoners using materials salvaged when the village that originally stood there was 'vacated' and the camp purpose built.

The walk in

Looking back to the entrance.  Wooden barracks on the left, brick on the right

One of the destroyed crematoria

At the end, the guide summed up the tour quite well.  She said that all the way through she had been asking us to imagine what it had been like, but, in reality we really couldn't imagine what it was like.  Around the end of the war there had been 100,000 people interred there.  Only 700 were liberated.  We were shown the women's barracks, again, untouched and you could feel the women that had occupied that space, 700 at a time, in bunks three tiers high, five per bunk with no toilet facilities, no insulation and no heating.  The dirt floor was uneven and the lowest bunks were straight on to that floor.  The upper bunks were wooden.  It was relatively warm today but we could still see our breath when we were standing inside.

Inside the women's barracks

That completed our tour and we were left to walk back to the other car park to meet our car and return to Krakow.

Looking back to Auschwitz II-Birkenau