Auschwitz In Person

I am pretty sure that no one arrives at Auschwitz in the 21st century expecting it to go well. But the magnitude of the operation is hard to imagine without actually seeing it. So while I would not recommend it as your first concentration camp experience, it could well be your second one, and it could well be your last. No need to go further, because the enormity of the murder of civilians that the Germans did in WWII will be unforgettable. it is estimated that 1.5 million people were either gassed or died of starvation, forced labor, infectious disease, individual executions, and medical experiments. That is a lot of misery in one spot.

Auschwitz was yet another place that existed before the Germans arrived and was used by them for their purposes. Auschwitz had for a long time been a German name for Oświęcim, the town by and around which the camps were located; the name "Auschwitz" was made the official name again by the Germans after they invaded Poland in September 1939. Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka (= "birch tree"), referred originally to a small Polish village that was destroyed by the Germans to make way for the camp. Poles who were evicted from here were not left alone or relocated. Most of them were amongst the first to die here.

Auschwitz became too small to contain the numbers of people sent there--despite the fact that the average length of stay was a mere three months. Starvation would end your life if you made it that long. So Birkenau was erected--while there was a lot of burning of buildings at war's end--the Germans knew they were going to be held accountable for what they had done, and they tried seperately to destroy the evidence of it--when you look from the reconstructed wooden buildings to the permanent brick ones that were built early on with the bricks that were salvaged from dismantling the town, you realize just how many people were there.

Compared to the barracks, the crematorium seems almost modest in size. But it adds to the impression that this was an operation designed to work people to death, then dispose of them. It seems so unbearably uncivilized, but it happened in the 20th century, and it was incredibly wide spread, as well as well thought out. Everyone who the Germans loathed were to be eliminated. Simple as that. The xenophobic gene is a powerful one, and we certainly see some strong examples of it in our culture too. We want to keep them out rather than exterminate them, but Aushhwitz should be a caution to us all that we are not far from that brutality.

The conditions in Birkenau were atrocious, much worse than in Auschwitz, and perhaps they came about because there were too many people to house, too few resources to devote to it, and then the added plus that when you dehumanize people it is easier to be cruel to them and finally to murder them. They cease to be people in your eyes. These were the toilets, just shallow holes all lined up. No privacy, no sanitation--it is almost like why bother to make them at all. Why not just use buckets and force people to empty them somewhere else, they are so inadequate. But somehow this image makes it hard for me to imagine going on, if you survived this, how would you rebuild your life? Today, prisoners of war are treated this way. No wonder they are so traumatized.