I had read both The Auschwitz Volunteer and Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account in the weeks leading up to our trip to Europe, to reacquaint myself with some of the facts and background leading to the most effective and brutal genocide attempt in human history. Nothing, however, could have prepared us for the scope and enormity of the horror we felt as we wandered the snow encrusted paths of these awful museums of indescribable human suffering.
Our driver got us to Auschwitz main camp before anyone else arrived and it was eerie and confronting to stand under the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei gate upon entry. We didn't feel like taking photos, but I'm glad we did in the end, as they go part of the way to describing our feelings on this day: shocked, cold, stunned and almost in a trance-like state for the majority of the time. We opted to self-guide, as we do at every opportunity we are afforded, but it was an especially good decision here. As the tours began to fill the place, we were able to cut out, skip a few sections, then head back later in peace and silence.
I remembered that the phone had a black and white function on its camera and thought that as the day was struggling to be more than monochromatic anyway, it would be a good choice for most of the photos. The main camp was barracks after barracks of horror. We were so shocked by the mountains of hair behind glass that I forgot to take a photo and we only properly regained our senses by the time we entered the next barracks. The well-known and written about "killing wall" was almost the most shocking thing in the camp, where many thousands of innocent men, women and children were slaughtered at this spot. We spent more than two hours at the main camp before we decided to rejoin Peter, our driver at the front for a ten minute drive to "Auschwitz II" the vastly superior killing machine that morphed into being after the evil genius of the Nazi brains trust realised that their goals could never be met at the original camp.
The main camp is very well preserved and is a physical monument to the millions who died there. Birkenau is more of an emotional tribute. While the famous train entrance and the tracks along with many of the wooden huts still stand, it is the vast acreages that are the most stunning and the stark chimneys against the horizon left by a panicked SS trying to burn the evidence of their atrocities as they fled further and further west in the end. We walked though some bitter snow flurries and wondered how anyone could survive harsher weather, dressed in rags, maltreated, worked almost to death, beaten, fed on nettles and water, all with the prospect of near-certain, horrific death hanging over their shoulders every single day and night. We walked though the outer camps few huts that were open to the public and were confronted by beastly smells: could the rank smell of dying humans permeate the wood of these bunks to this day? The ruins of the ovens were more evidence of fleeing, panicking guards and we witnessed the spot where people were selected to go "to the left", which meant directly to baths, death then ovens, or "to the right", where they would live short, tortured lives until they could work no more, whereupon their fate was the same.
We'll never go back to these horrific places. However, we're both glad we went: it feels almost like it is a human being's right of passage to witness it. This is the album link.
I'll try and publish a final instalment tomorrow about Krakow: it will be cheerier.