Auschwitz and Birkenau

      Sorry this is coming so late!  I thought I had avoided whatever was going around during the travelling seminar only to wake up the day after feeling terrible.  I'm finally starting to feel like myself again, so I'm back to the blog!
      After we left lovely Krakow we drove to Auschwitz.  The nervous pit in my stomach formed the night before and built as we drove.  I've never experienced anything as real, if that's the right word, as Auschwitz.  I've seen movies with brutality, movies about the holocaust even, but I'd never actually experienced anything this wholly sad and cruel up close and personal.

Entrance to Auschwitz I

      As I got off the bus and laid eyes on the camp my breath got caught in my throat.  The barbed wire fences and dilapidated brick buildings gave off an eerie feel.  I felt like I was stepping into a horror house (though I've only been to one and seem to have wiped the entire experience from my memory).  I found myself constantly repeating "but this is real" in my head the entire tour.  The first set of blocks were about the daily life at the camp.  A model showed the food given to each person daily including two bowls of brown water called coffee, a bowl of "soup" which was really just more water, and a piece of bread.  They would drink their water, then go to work for the entire day.  When someone moved too slowly, or couldn't go on at all, they were brutally punished and killed.  The prisoners were forced to carry their dead and dying companions back to camp at the end of the day.

Endless Fences

      The next blocks were dedicated to the prisoners deaths.  This was the most striking part of the exhibit to me.  The first room we walked into had a model of a gas chamber that was destroyed by the Nazis before liberation to hide their crimes.  The model was truly a piece of poignant art and was horrifying to look at.  In the next room, behind a wall of glass were piles and piles of hair.  Human hair.  The Nazis shaved the heads of their prisoners to sell and make cloth out of; in fact, some of the nazi uniforms were made of human hair.  When the camp was liberated, 7 tons of hair were found at the camp, and while an entire room was filled with it, the hair shown was less then half of the hair found.  The rest of the rooms were filled with other possessions of those murdered including glasses, suitcases, clothing, and toys.  Each room was just as shocking as the last, and they seemed to go on and on.

Blocks

      Just when I thought it would never end, we moved on to the last set of blocks: the camp prison.  There were multiple kinds of cells the Nazis used to torture and kill those who broke the harsh rules in the camp.  There were starvation cells where people were kept with no food until they starved to death, suffocation cells where groups of people were stuffed into rooms with no windows until they ran out of oxygen, and standing cells where a few people would be forced into a tiny box of a room with no room to move or sit.  The halls and rooms were small and claustrophobic and I felt like I was running out of air as we moved from one to another.  Needless to say, I was happy to get out of that block.
      My happiness did not last long as I learned the last destination of our tour: the one remaining gas chamber.  I was extremely nervous for this portion of the tour.  I wasn't sure if I could handle such an experience.  I didn't want to block out the emotions I felt at Auschwits, but at the same time, I saw no other possible option.  I wasn't sure I would be capable of handling whatever I was bound to feel in the gas chamber.  I took a deep breath and entered the three rooms.  The first room was extremely small and was meant for changing.  Prisoners were told to remember which hook they hung their clothes on so they could retrieve them after their shower... The next room was the gas chamber.  It was much smaller than I expected, and didn't have the shower heads that are depicted in movies.  Instead the poison, a German cleaning chemical, was dumped into holes in the ceiling.  Because the room was so small, I didn't fully realize where I was until I entered the next room: the crematorium.  The huge oven looking devices were used to burn the bodies of the dead.  As I left the gas chamber I took a huge gulp of air and realized I had been holding my breath the entire time.
      I was happy the tour was over as we drove towards our lunch break which was much more light and at least semi-happy, though everyone was in a somber mood after the morning. We quickly wrapped up lunch and loaded on the bus for the second tour of the day: Birkenau.
      Birkenau was huge.  Much much larger than I ever imagined.  The entrance was extremely creepy, though I've seen it in pictures many times.  The platform inside was something from a horror movie.  I could picture the prisoners unloading the train anxious and happy to resettled in the East like the Nazis had promised.  Instead they found two pillars of fire rising from the gas chambers only meters away.  According to testimonies from survivors, fire was constantly pouring from the chimneys, and the stench of death clung to the camp like a disease.  The prisoners were separated into two groups: those fit for labor and those fit for death.  The prisoners that were not lucky enough to be sentenced to hard labor and brutal living conditions were marched straight to the gas chambers.  Some unlucky Jewish prisoners, called the Sonderkommand, were forced to remove gold teeth and shave the heads of the corpses.  Occasionally a Sonderkommand worker would recognize a neighbor, friend, or even wife or child among the dead.

Platform

      As we stood by the destroyed gas chambers our tour guide read testimonials of survivors.  The most horrifying of which described how a member of the Sonderkommand found a child still alive among the dead.  He brought her to the Nazi commander to beg for her life.  Instead, the commander threw the child to the ground and snapped her neck with a stomp of his boot.
      Birkenau is mostly a sea of ruins today.  All that is left of almost all the blocks are rows and rows of chimneys from unused heating systems.  The entire camp feels like a huge grave yard.  After spending the day walking around the camp we finally headed to our hotel for the night: a Monastery (a unique and bizarre experience in its own right).

Ruins

      The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again. - George Santayana.  This quote hung in one of the rooms in Auschwitz I.  Though there were many similarly touching quotes throughout the exhibit, this one in particular struck me.  This quote explains perfectly why I love history and decided to become a history major.  I have always believed that we can learn so much from history and that one is a fool to look forward without looking back.  I'm extremely thankful for the experience I had had Auschwitz and Birkenau and will never forget how I felt that day.  Though as I left Oświęcim it struck me how cruel humankind can be, my final thought was not one of shame or sadness, but amazement at how strong, brave, and full of love humanity can be when facing such cruelty.

- Patty