The wakeup call came at 5am and we were off bright and early, first stop Auschwitz. We meet our guide Simon who took us on a 3 hour tour full of history, heartache and hardship.
Auschwitz was a very understated museum, it is definitely not a tourist attraction and those that work hard to keep it open to the public do it in honour of the memory of those who suffered during this time and as a way of ensuring that the lessons learned from history will hopefully not be repeated.
We spent 2 hours in Auschwitz 1 where the barracks have exhibitions of photographs, drawings and documentation from the period of terror 1940-45. These were simple yet very effective at helping us to understand what happened at Auschwitz which was originally set up as a concentration camp with an initial goal of degradation not death. However this changed in the later years and to the Germans it wasn’t about the number of Jews killed but the efficiency of how it was done – to them it was simply ‘beauracratic task’.
The average life expectancy once admitted into Auschwitz was 3-4 months. Jews from all over Europe were brought via cattle carriages which could take up to 2 weeks, with little food or water, many didn’t survive. Upon arrival at the station they were sorted with some marching straight to the gas chambers and those that were considered of worth for slave labour or medical testing (this was mainly targeted at children) were registered and given a number.
One of the more hard hitting exhibitions was that of the belongings of the Jewish people. We walked through rooms that contained 50 ton of Human hair that the Germans collected off their victims and on sold for textile purposes – little was wasted from the extermination of the Jews. Another room had a pile of suitcases; over a thousand from just one of the many trains that brought people to Auschwitz. People’s names and birth dates were written on them, just one of the many things that were done to give the Jews a false hope that they would be returned to them. This was sobering reading actual people’s names – they were no longer just names from History books they became real people to us.
Another of the barracks had been preserved in its original setting with the bunkrooms, undressing areas and rooms where the prisoners fates were decided. Underneath the barracks was some of the types of cells – these included starvation cells and torture cells with just a small window barely letting in any light. The most horrendous was the other form of torture cell which was only 1m2 and the prisoner had to crawl into them like a dog house and remain there until he was let out again to work. We also visited a model of the gas chambers and crematorium.
There is so much more we could tell you about, but this will do for now.
There is something incomprehensible as to what happened at Aschwitz and to understand the circumstances that lead people to do what they did. Simon put it well in that you can’t put yourselves in their shoes so therefore you cannot judge the decisions that were made. The other thing was all our travels so far we have looked at and talked about events in History that happened hundreds of years ago. The liberation of Auschwitz was only 65 years ago...while we were visiting the camps a survivor of the Holocaust was also there. Simon had earlier been telling us this man’s escape story of how he and 3 other men managed to get a car, uniform and guns to be able to drive straight out the front gate of the camp and escape to freedom. Unfortunately for this man he ended up in a Polish prison for another 10 years before he actually was free. Just seeing this elderly man standing talking to some men by the ruins of the gas chamber made you realise again how recent and real everything was.
The writing on the gates translates into something like – In work there is freedom, but as Simon explained to us the reality for people entering through these gates was that their only freedom would come from death.
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