My Poland Trip ( part 1 )

Today marks the 16th anniversary of the most deadly attack to ever occur on US soil. In one day over 2,000 innocent lives were lost. This past weekend I went to Poland where I saw a place where sometimes up to 9,000 people lost their lives per day. This place was Auschwitz- Birkenau. Between these two Nazi concentration/death camps over 2 million innocent people were murdered in a span of about four years.

After a twelve hour, overnight car ride, all eight of us students could honestly say that we were pretty tired from a sub-par sleep from the night before. However, as our van pulled into the parking lot at 8:30 am our sleepy selves became reinvigorated with anticipation of the experience ahead of us. Thanks to our awesome driver and trip planner Femi, we already had tickets enabling us to skip the growing line at the ticket counter. Once we passed through a small security screening a certain silence fell over the group. There it was, the place you hear all about in school and in the movies. One of the most evil places in the world, and here I was standing at the gates. The experience felt unreal to me. It really did not feel like all these things actually happened here. The first thing that greeted us was the famous iron gate reading "Arbeit macht frei" in German or 'work sets you free' in English (pictured above). When we walked under the gate I was struck by how peaceful the place was in the morning sun. The air was warm and the skies were clear. If a person ignorant of history were to be in my place at that very moment, they may have thought they stumbled opon a cute little abandoned town with matching houses with uniform red-brown color. They, however, would have been grossly mistaken.

The eerily peaceful and oddly beautiful Auschwitz in the morning light

Thrown off by the peaceful beauty of such a horrible place we moved into one of the twenty eight housing blocks that were at the camp. Many of these housing blocks have been remodeled to be more of a museum containing different pictures, artifacts, and write-ups about what happened at Auschwitz and stories of different people's lives. One thing that stood out was this little hole in the wall. It was found in the 60's during a renovation. Some prisoner must have been planning an escape because within the wall there were shoes, razor, and some other things. (I do apologize for the poor picture quality).

As we moved on through our walk through of the camp we saw some of the rooms prisoners were kept in such as the one shown below. This room looked to have a smooth cement floor with thin straw mattresses lined side to side, wall to wall. This set up was prevalent earlier in the camp's history. The room next to this one just had straw on the floor. The new arrivals would only have the straw to lay on when they came. Down the cement hall way there were other rooms that actually had 3-tier bunk beds. The bunk beds would be more prevalent in the later years of the camp.

The next place I went was to a building were there were some specialized cells.In this building there were standing cells so small that the prisoner could only stand or at best lean against the wall, a starvation cell, and also cells that were so poorly ventilated that prisoners actually died from lack of oxygen. The most notable of the cells was one of the starvation cells painted all black and taking up the about a 12x12 foot area. In the cell pictured a Polish priest sacrificed his own life by starving to death to save another prisoner. Despite all the horrors of this camp, there were still a few precious acts that were truly pure and good, this was one such action. Some of the other notable stories were the tales of how pregnant women delivered babies at Auschwitz with the help of nurse prisoners. They worked together to deliver the baby and even save some mothers and their children until the camp was liberated in 1945.

The starvation cell where the priest gave up his life to save another's.

The tall barbed wire fence surrounding the camp

As we moved throughout the camp among the oppressive and tall barbed wire fences and guards posts we moved to the most evil parts of the camp. One of the gas chambers. There was a door in the side of a small hill that would open up into the chamber. It was here where the new arrivals not deemed suitable for work would come to die. First they would take away all valuable belongings. Then they would separate the women and men, inevitably splitting many families. I vaguely remember a sign with a first hand account saying something to the affect of " they first took all of our belongings. As if that wasn't enough they then told us to separate men and women. Some of us were too shocked to even move when we heard this, but once the guards started clubbing those who did not listen in the front even those in the back of the line slowly complied." Not a direct quote but that is how it went to the best of my recollection. After this, they were ordered to strip and move into the chamber. Then Zyklon B pellets were dropped in the chamber from above killing all inside. We were able to actually go into this gas chamber. It was very surreal. It was just a large cement room with vents in the top. Very simple, yet very efficient at its purpose. In the next room were two ovens where the bodies would be cremated. Again, this shows just how efficient the Nazis were at killing people and disposing their bodies. There really are no words.

The door they would enter the gas chamber

The gas chamber and crematorium from the outside. Notice the crematorium chimney

After seeing some more things we took the three minute shuttle ride to the Birkenau Death Camp. As the bus turned the corner we could see chimneys and what I will call long houses. These chimneys numbering in the hundreds were what was left of the other long houses. These long houses were simply long wooden structures to house those waiting for death. As we approached closer I saw the famous gate house into Birkenau pictured below. This place was absolutely huge. I estimate it was a little less than one square mile in area and all that was there were the hundreds of long houses. Each one could hold up to 400 people. The scale was almost incomprehensible. In the middle of the camp were a set of train tracks that sent trains loaded with people back to the two gas chambers/ crematorium. The gas chambers/crematoria were rubble because the Nazis tried to erase any evidence they could in the final days of the war. Also present was a memorial to all those who died in that camp. It was constructed where the innocent people would wait to descend to the chambers. Here are some pictures below.

Inside one of the long houses

The view arriving into Birkenau

A rail car people would be hauled into the camp with

The picture doesn't really do a justice for the scale but the row on long houses extends all the way to the trees way at the end of the path.

The chimneys of the destroyed long houses

View of Birkenau from the air. this is only half of the camp. The other half is on the left side of the picture.

Some of the wreckage of what used to be the gas chambers and crematorium

The toilets in the long houses

I learned a little more about the evil human beings are capable of in those three hours I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was truly horrific but I am very glad I had the opportunity to go. I have always been appreciative of the life I have lived up till now. I don't know why I have been born into such great circumstances. Why did I get the lucky cards? It is possible I could have been one of those babies born in Auschwitz, or maybe have been one of those people who suffered horrific things to end up dying in a gas chamber, but I am not. I've learned it's not just enough to be appreciative and grateful for the life I have been given, I have to do something with it. It can't go to waste.