Bearing witness to the horrors of the past: Auschwitz-Birkenau

A few weeks ago, Alyssa and I toured Auschwitz-Birkenau while staying in Kraków, Poland. It was an unforgettable experience, and I’m glad I went. If given the chance, I recommend everyone to go. That said, it was an overwhelmingly difficult experience, and I wouldn’t do it again.

Prepare yourselves… I will be sharing every detail of this experience with you all.

Why we went

To be honest, touring the concentration camps is not something I ever imagined myself doing. However, it was something that Alyssa had always wanted to do since she studies history and specializes in WWII.

When we were planning our trip to Prague, she mentioned that Auschwitz wasn’t too far away. Since we had an entire week, it only made sense to work a tour into our itinerary. Neither of us had been in the region before, and neither of us were likely to be there again any time soon… so it seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The night before the tour, Alyssa and I talked about the importance of bearing witness to the horrors of the past when possible. Even though I had learned about the Holocaust in school and seen “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”, there was still a lot left for me to learn and feel. I knew that touring Auschwitz would be an uncomfortable experience, but I also knew that my perspective would be changed forever afterwards.

When I was discussing my experience with Merit after returning to Aberdeen, she told me that they learn a lot about the Holocaust during school in Germany. They not only have classes about it every year, but they are also required to visit the concentration camps before graduating from secondary school. Germany’s effort to instill the horrors of the Holocaust in their children to prevent something similar from happening again reinforces the idea that education is the best way to prevent history from repeating itself.

How we got there

As I mentioned in previous posts, Alyssa and I had taken a 7 hour train from Prague to Kraków the day before our tour of Auschwitz and were staying in a hostel in Kraków. We had booked the tour on Get Your Guide for about $18, which is pretty cheap considering it was an 8 hour tour. Our bus left at 9 am from a location that was just a ten minute walk from our hostel, and it took about an hour and a half to get there.

When we arrived, our guide handed out the tickets we needed to enter the museum. There were a lot of people on the bus, so we ended up getting divided into four smaller groups for the tour. Before the tour started, we each got a set of headphones that connected to the guide’s microphone. I really appreciated this feature, as I was able to hear what my tour guide was saying at all times.

At the end of the day, the bus took us back to the meeting location in Kraków. Overall, getting to and from Auschwitz from Kraków (and even Prague, really) was super easy.

Tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Part I)

Once we were inside the museum, we met up with our tour guide. She was absolutely incredible. Throughout the entire tour, she spoke with an austere tone of voice that made the experience even more haunting than it would have been without a guide.

We entered the camp under the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign. If you have seen pictures of Auschwitz, this sign is usually depicted most often. The phrase is written in German and means “work sets you free”.

There was tall, barbed wire fencing around the entire camp. Nobody could have escaped from the camp once inside.

From the moment I stepped inside the camp, I felt a change in the energy. It was a haunting feeling to be standing in the same place where millions of innocent people were sent to be tortured and murdered.

Our guide started off the tour by explaining how the Nazis first imprisoned those who were a threat to their power. Educators and politicians were some of the first people to be sent to the concentration camps. However, the majority of prisoners were Jews. The prisoners came from all over Europe, but a large number of Jews were deported from Hungary.

Inside one of the buildings which used to house the prisoners, there were photos of Hungarian Jews getting off of the train which had brought them from Budapest to Auschwitz. Young children held their mothers’ hands, and each person carried a piece of hand luggage containing their most valuable possessions.

Within a few moments of those photos being taken, the families shown would have been split apart forever. Some people would be chosen to work, and many would be sent straight to the gas chambers. The Nazis would then rob them of their personal items, giving them to banks and families in Germany.

It was an awful feeling to look at photos of families knowing that it was the last time they ever saw each other. I thought about those who were selected to work in the camps and what they must have felt when their siblings, parents, and spouses were sent to the chambers to be exterminated. I thought about the children who would have been begging their mothers for an explanation, and the mothers who tried to stay calm for the sake of their children.

The next exhibit we visited consisted of a ceiling-high pile of suitcases: the suitcases that belonged to those who were sent to Auschwitz. There had to have been hundreds if not thousands of suitcases in that pile.

Our tour guide said that a survivor once toured the exhibit and pointed out her own piece of luggage.

There was also a pile of shoes from those who were killed. Once again, the pile went all the way up to the ceiling. Seeing that many shoes really put into perspective just how many people were killed in the camp. Even the enormous pile was only a fraction of the total number of shoes left behind by the camp’s victims.

Tears filled my eyes when I saw the pairs of baby shoes scattered throughout the pile.

A similar-sized pile of human hair was one of the other exhibits we visited. The hair had been cut off of women’s heads upon their arrival to the camp as part of the dehumanizing process.

Much of it was still braided.

Next, we walked down a hallway filled with photos of victims. Under each photo was information such as the person’s name, their job, the day they were deported, and the day they died. Some people lived a few months, some only a few days. According to our tour guide, 1/5 of the Polish population died during the Holocaust which means that nearly everyone knows someone who died in the concentration camps.

In fact, her uncle had been imprisoned in Auschwitz.

Seeing the faces of the victims, learning about their lives and deaths, and hearing from a victim’s family member made me feel more connected to the Polish people. When I had been learning about the Holocaust in school, Poland felt like such a faraway place. I imagined the horror of it all by focusing on the numbers: how many people were killed. This experience helped me remember who was killed in addition to “how many”.

While standing in this hallway, our tour guide told us another tear-jerking story. She had been giving a tour once when a man asked her if he could have one of the photos on the wall. The photo was of his mother, and it was the only one he would have had of her.

Next, we saw the places where people were tortured.

There was a “suffocation room”, which was where people were sent to die a slow and painful death. The room was small, and there were no windows. Next to that, there was a tiny area about half the size of a closet where people were forced to stand for days. There was no room to sit down.

Outside, there was the “death wall” where people were shot to death. If one person tried to escape or simply didn’t show up for roll call, a random ten would be selected to be executed. They didn’t have to have anything to do with the missing person.

Not far from the death wall was a board with several nooses hanging from it. While the death wall was tucked between two buildings, the row of nooses were out in the center of the camp. Either way, the prisoners certainly witnessed a lot of gruesome execution.

Next, we saw the gas chamber. It was horrifying. I saw the shower heads that never actually poured out water; the hatches on the ceiling where Zyklon was poured onto the victims’ heads; and the scratches on the wall from people trying to escape.

Before being led into the gas chambers, people were told to strip naked for a “shower”. Once everyone was inside, the door was shut and locked. By this time, panic would have broken out as everyone realized that they were not actually getting showers. The hatches were opened up on the ceiling, and Zyklon was dumped on the victim’s heads. There were no lights inside the chambers, so the brief gleam of daylight that came through the ceiling as the hatches were being opened would have been the last thing everyone saw before death.

Contrary to what I believed prior to the tour, the camp guards were NOT the ones to lead the prisoners into the chambers, remove the evidence of death from inside the chamber, and cremate the bodies.

They forced the prisoners to do it all.

Many of these people knew each other. There were cases where the prisoners had to lead their own friends, families, and neighbors into the gas chambers, poison them, and then cremate their dead bodies. I cannot even begin to imagine just how awful that must have been.

Tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Part II)

Next, we took the bus to another camp which was about ten minutes away from the first one. Upon arrival, we were greeted once again by the same small-group tour guide that we had before.

This camp was significantly bigger than the one we had previously toured. There were train tracks that passed through the entrance and into the camp.

The tracks were used to transport thousands of prisoners directly into the camp. After those people were exterminated, their ashes were spread onto the tracks.

Resting on the tracks was a carriage that people would have traveled in on their way to the camp. As you can see, it would have been very suffocating, and there would not have been any light.

The place where I’m standing in the photo above is where people like Josef Mengele would have sorted the carriage’s passengers using only his thumb. If he pointed left, the person would go to the gas chambers. If he pointed right, they would be forced to work in the camp.

Women and children were usually sent straight to gas chambers. However, children were sometimes selected for Mengele’s experiments. He was especially interested in twins. He tortured them by performing all sorts of experiments, and once he was finished they too were killed.

If the camp was in need of more workers, physically fit men were chosen to work. However, if there was not a need for more workers, entire carriages would get sent straight to the gas chambers.

The place where I’m standing in the photo above is the place where families were split forever. I couldn’t help but imagine my own family being split, half of us to live, the other half to die.

In this camp, nearly 10,000 bodies were cremated every day.

People were hardly ever allowed to shower, but when they did they were forced to take cold showers and then put on wet clothes afterwards… even in the dead of winter.

Next, we saw the blown up gas chambers. The Nazi’s had blown them up at the end of WWII to get rid of evidence. They were much larger than the one at the first camp, which is why the daily killing rates were so much higher.

The size of this camp made me feel nauseous. There were rows and rows of buildings, and one thousand prisoners had lived in each one. The flat, open space inside the barbed wire would have been busy with skeleton-like prisoners suffering through through their days of intense labor. Dead bodies awaiting cremation would have been piled up in the same places I was standing.

I kind of hinted at this earlier (see first photo), but there was also a memorial inside the camp about the importance of bearing witness to the horrors of the Holocaust to prevent it from ever happening again. Written in several different languages was, “For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children, mainly Jews from various countries of Europe”.

Afterwards

On the way back to Kraków from the tour, I felt claustrophobic in my own head. I couldn’t stop thinking about everything I had just seen, felt, and heard. For a second, I thought that I would never be happy again… that I would never stop thinking about it all.

I thought about it a LOT the next few days. It was hard not to. Thankfully, Alyssa and I had each other to talk to. In total, we probably spent several hours debriefing throughout the rest of the week.

Overall, touring Auschwitz was life-changing experience. I will never again look at facts about the millions of people who were killed during the Holocaust without picturing the victims’ faces, the awful conditions they lived and died under, and the piles of shoes, luggage, and hair they left behind.

Until next time,

Clara