Day Two: Visit to AUSCHWITZ CAMP

the3l3n30
Jun 10, 2020
4 min read

Since I'm already in Krakow so I plan to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp. To get there, there are direct trains that connect Krakow to Oswiecim, the city that is located 2 km from the Auschwitz concentration camp and it takes 1.5 to 2.5 hours to get to Oswiecim from Krakow.

Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. The Auschwitz is the most famous camp because is the most lethal of the Nazi extermination camps and has become the emblematic site of the “final solution,” a virtual synonym for the Holocaust. Around 1.1 to 1.5 million people died at Auschwitz and 90 percent of them were Jews.

This is the main gate to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where every victim entered. The gate reads “Arbeit Macht Frei” which means “Work will make you free.” In reality this camp designed for mass extermination, and the prisoners thought they were going to labor camps. Anyone who walked through these gates mostly don't survived.

The view from the barrack windows, all you could see were gates, fences, and the watch towers where the soldiers would sit with machine guns waiting to shoot anyone who stepped out of line.

All the areas is full with double barbed wire electrified fences so is virtually impossible to escape from the camp with armed guards.

This is a courtyard between two barracks. You can see the windows of these barracks are boarded and bricked up because the soldiers did not want the prisoners to see what was going on in this courtyard where behind this wall was mass shooting executions took place.

The prisoners will be serve about 300 grams of black bread, served with about 25 grams of sausage, or margarine, or a tablespoon of marmalade or cheese. The bread served in the evening was supposed to cover the needs of the following morning as well, although the famished prisoners usually consumed the whole portion at once.

Prisoners were stripped of their own civilian clothing and forced this uniform. It was patterned with blue stripes. Men were given a cap, trousers and jacket to wear. Women wore a dress or skirt with a jacket and kerchief for their head.

These are all the personal items stolen and collected from the victims. There were walls and walls of shoes, suitcases, eyeglasses, hairbrushes, home goods, toys, even human hair that had been shaved and collected. It was really disturbing and sad.

The soldiers kept the people fated to die unaware of what awaited them. They were told that they were being sent to the camp, but that they first had to undergo disinfection and bathe. After the victims undressed, they were taken into the gas chamber, locked in, and killed with Zyklon B gas. The actual room where prisoners were handed a bar of soap and a towel, and told they were taking a shower.

Canisters which contained Zyklon B, a pesticide that used for killing victims in the gas chambers.

After they were killed, Sonderkommando prisoners dragged the corpses out of the gas chambers. They cut off the women’s hair and removed all metal dental work and jewelry. Then they burned the corpses in pits, on pyres, or in the crematorium furnaces.

After finished the tour in Auschwitz, we need to take this bus to Birkenau camp. Auschwitz wasn’t big enough to hold all the prisoners, so they built a second camp, Birkenau.

Birkenau was much bigger than I thought and although most of the barracks were destroyed, but you still can see where they used to be. There were rows upon rows.

These are the cars that transported the Jews. Holocaust train were railways transports run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn national railway (Auschwitz-Birkenau). The last train for Birkenau left Theresienstadt on 28 October 1944 with 2,038 Jews of whom 1,589 were immediately gassed.

These are three layer bunks where the prisoners sleep. The bunks are just hard wooden shelves with no mattresses or even straw for cushioning. The bottom bunk is just dirt and brick. In each bunk, a minimum of eight people were crammed on each level.

The memorial site for those innocent people get killed at here.

I realised when visiting Birkenau isn’t like a museum because mostly you left on your own with your thoughts. Throughout the whole tour, I feel numb, like it was too much to take in, too much for me to possibly comprehend. The displays at Auschwitz I and Birkenau illustrate how inhuman humans can be and take a chilling look at the Nazi regime and its penchant for torture and extermination. The museum will not only give you an unnerving and blood-curdling history lesson, but also see the dreadful history for themselves as the evils of the past grip everyone who sets foot in the museum.

After the whole camp tour ended, I still left some couple of hours to spend before take a train back to Krakow. So I decided to walk around the nearby city call Oswiecim.