Auschwitz and Birkenau

What is Auschwitz-Birkenau?

Auschwitz & Birkenau are two of the most well known concentration camps in Poland. It is impossible to really grasp that approximately 1.25 million men, women and children lost their lives there.

In 1940, 1.5 million Polish Jews had been taken from their homes and forced to live in Ghettos obeying the rule of their persecutors. The conditions in these ghettos were horrific, and in the space of merely a year between 1941 and 1942 500,000 Jewish people died there from sickness or malnutrition.

Mass killings had been occurring throughout the outbreak of war and by 1941 440,000 Jews had been shot. The method of killing was usually quite systematic – Jews were rounded up and forced to dig their own mass graves before being executed.

The SS commanders who committed these murders soon began to complain of inefficiencies in this method of killing and some complained of the trying and personal nature of shooting. They wanted something which killed thousands of Jews quickly and was less upsetting for the killers themselves, not the victims. It was in December 1941 that the Nazis began experimentation with gas, and established how much gas was necessary to kill thousands of people efficiently.

After this method was established, Heydrich announced his policy of murder. Jews from all over Europe would be rounded up and ‘relocated’ to the East. Once there the fittest would be set to work, and those unfit to work would be murdered upon arrival. Any who survived the forced labour would be murdered. It was a great achievement for the Nazis; not only were they exterminating a hated and supposedly ‘inferior’ race, but they were obtaining free slave labour too.

Anybody who did not fit into the Nazi plans was sent to these camps, including the mentally ill, homosexuals, disabled people, Jews, Gypsies and Prisoners of War. The main aim was to rid the world of Jews, and create a ‘superior’ Aryan race, a ‘cleaner’ German race.

Within a year of the Nazi occupation of Poland, Henreich Himmler (an SS leader and perpetrator of the Holocaust) ordered the establishment of a concentration camp in the town of Oswiecim (or the Germanised name Auschwitz). Auschwitz itself had been a purpose built barracks for Government agencies, sometimes being used to house Polish refugees and army members. 300 local Jews were used in the conversion of the barracks of Auschwitz into the concentration camp it as known as today.

Eventually Auschwitz itself was regarded as too small, and its gas chamber (which killed 500 people a day) was regarded as inefficient, the Nazis wanted to kill as many people as possible. It was then that Birkenau was established, with its purpose built gas chambers and crematorium, a factory of killing.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is one of the six killing centres created in Poland with the sole purpose of eliminating German enemies and cleansing the German race. It is here that the majority of murder was concentrated, with 1.25 million people losing their lives in these two camps alone. There was one other work camp, similar to that of Auschwitz & Birkenau, the remaining camps were created for killing and killing alone – few survived from these camps.

What happened in the camps?

Upon arrival into the camp, victims were unloaded from the trains and told to leave their suitcases and possessions on the platform. All possessions were collected up and sent to storage inside the camp. They were then divided into two groups – workers and those who were sent to their death. 1m saw the difference between life and death, or at least instant death by gassing and a prolonged torturous death by exhaustion, malnutrition and disease

A single SS guard made the decision sporadically about who lived and who died. Pregnant women, mothers and their small children and babies, the mentally ill and disabled were sent to their death upon arrival – they were useless to the Nazis. Only those fit to work were spared and began their torturous and short lives at the camp.

Those selected for death marched the last journey they would ever make from the train platform of their arrival to the gas chambers. Once there, they were told to strip in changing rooms and surrender their belongings. They were deceived until the very end when they were informed to make sure they remembered the number of the pegs they had left their clothes on. They were led into a ‘shower room’ where they met their deaths by gas.

Those who survived the selection were sent to rooms to be ‘processed’. All personal items were removed and sent to ‘Kanada’, anything valuable was sent back to Germany to help the war effort. Prisoners had been informed that they were ‘relocating to the East’ and so had packed a suitcase full of their most valuable, most useful and prized possessions. They would never see these items again.

Workers were shaved all over, forced to take freezing showers and afterwards registered. The registration varied after the introduction of the camps became more widespread. At first prisoners were photographed upon arrival and thousands of photographs of startled and confused people scatter the walls of Auschwitz. Soon however, this was regarded as inefficient and uneconomical and instead they were tattooed with their prisoner number and their names were recorded. Those who were taken straight to their death were not registered at all.

Prisoners were stripped of all their identity and only referred to as numbers; it was this dehumanisation that led many to fight to retain a sense of dignity and humanity by showering in their selected 5 minutes per day, even if the water was dirty.

Inside the camps prisoners were divided into different sections, and communication between these sections was next to impossible. Prisoners were weak and near to starvation – exhausted from their work.

All those kept in the concentration camps were forced to wear uniforms identifying the type of prisoner they were (gypsy, Jew, Prisoner of War etc each had their own identifiable uniform). The uniforms were often taken straight off of the body of another dead prisoner and so were dirty when they were given to prisoners, let alone afterwards when the clothes on their back were the only ones they had to their name. They lived the remainders of their lives wearing the same items of clothing ever single day, with the smell of the previous occupier still remaining.

Not only this but the clothing was inadequate for the conditions the prisoners were forced to work in. Their work often occurred outside when the clothing was only one layer and consisted of thin material, completely insufficient for the snow and rain that prisoners often found themselves working in.

Work at the camps was varied from working in the kitchens to working in the crematoriums themselves. Each job had different benefits and of course major costs and a sort of hierarchy developed within the prisoner community. Prisoners were lucky if they had prized jobs such as working in the kitchens or in the Kanada section of the camp which contained possessions. This was because they could attempt to steal extra rations and supplies, if caught however they would be shot.

Other jobs meant that prisoners died within a matter of months, such as those involving work outside. Outside work was especially tough for those prisoners who had been moved from warmer climates such as Greece, and simply the shock of climate change caused many of these prisoners to die.

Why was there no resistance?

Straight after the war, Jews themselves were criticised for not rebelling against the Nazi rule, some even claimed that they ‘went to the gas chambers like sheep to the slaughter’. This is an extremely unfair view to take, the impracticalities of resistance pushed against the Jewish people and other prisoners.

The first waves of Jewish people sent to the camps had no idea what was in store for them when they arrived in Poland, they really did believe that they were being relocated to a different ghetto in the East. Only small rumours about concentration camps existed, and these weren’t widespread. The area around Auschwitz itself had been evacuated to create an exclusion zone to prevent knowledge of what took place inside Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Jewish people were given food and extra rations if they volunteered themselves, and due to the wartime situation it was seen as a daily occurrence to register for rations. Once they had registered in these disguised Nazi booths however they would be taken away to the camps.

Immigration was expensive and only those who could find sponsors or support, or those financially well off could afford the costs of moving to another country. As well as this, few countries were willing to accept vast quantities of refugees. Those who did escape the grasps of the Nazis found themselves either in no-mans land in horrific conditions or living in countries which stared at their refugee population with resentment.

Not only this but by 1943 Jews had been forced to wear the Star of David on their clothes, and given papers which marked them out as Jewish. If they were ever caught attempting to leave the country or cross borders without the correct documentation they would be shot.

However, despite all of this there actually was some form of resistance. Many young people in the ghettos organised resistance cells, however very few people had military training and weapons were in extremely short supply. The effectiveness of these uprisings was therefore extremely limited.

One of the most impressive and remarkable uprisings occurred in October 1944. The Sonderkommando (or the prisoners who worked in the crematorium) organised an uprising with the help of some of the female prisoners. They managed to kill some of the SS officers and destroy one of the gas chambers. After this uprising Himmler ordered that the killing in the gas chambers be stopped and the remaining crematoria destroyed.

Those who rebelled also knew that the responsibility of the lives of everybody else remaining in the camps and ghettos lay in their hands. Any form of resistance would lead to reprisals, torture and murder of family and friends. Once inside the camp, if one person escaped ten people were lined up and shot to make an example of them.

Auschwitz-Birkenau & the Holocaust – The Facts

• In July 1933 the ‘law for prevention of hereditarily diseased progency’ made it compulsory for the physically disabled or ‘feeble minded’ to be sterilised to prevent the ‘weakening’ of the Aryan race

• By 1939, between 320-350,000 people (1% of the German population) had been forcibly sterilised

• Aryans were prohibited from marrying or having a relationship with Jews

• The ‘Aryanisation of Jewish business’ led to the forcible sale of Jewish property at ridiculously low prices

• In 1938 Polish Jews living in Germany were expelled

• On Kristallnacht, one single incident, over 90 Jews were killed and 30,000 sent to concentration camps. This occurred because one Jewish man in France assassinated a German official

• Between 1933 and 1939, approximately half the German Jewish population and over two-thirds of the Austrian-Jews fled persecution

• Most foreign countries, including Britain, were unaccommodating to the Jewish population and did not want to admit large numbers of refugees. British newspapers claimed that Jews were exaggerating the problems they faced in Germany

• The 1.5 million Polish Jews ruled over by the Nazis were forced to live in Ghettos before being transported to death camps or work camps

• Between January 1941 and July 1942 roughly 500,000 Jews died of sickness or malnutrition in the Polish ghettos

• Between 1939 and 1941, over 70,000 inmates of a home for the incurably ill or disabled were sent to gas chambers

• After outrage from the German public and Catholic churches, the murder of these patients was stopped, except for children

• By 1941 440,000 Jews had been shot dead

• In January 1941 Reinhard Heydrich announced the policy of eliminating the Jews of Europe which consisted of the work / death camps in Poland

• A map was drawn up and the amount of Jews in each country were labelled to be eliminated, this included the Jews in Britain and other ‘unconquered’ countries

• In the summer of 1942, the rounding up of the Jews began. They were taken to local camps before being deported and sent directly to the killing centres

• There were a total of six death camps, strategically located near high Jewish populations and good transport links

• Four of the camps (Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor & Belzec served as extermination camps

• Only Majdanek & Auschwitz-Birkenau functioned as work camps

• In summer 1942 Auschwitz was enlarged from a concentration camp to a killing centre and Birkenau was established with its purpose built crematoriums and gas chambers

• More than 1.25 million people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 9/10 were Jewish

• In March 1944, the German army took over Hungary and sent over 437,000 Hungarian-Jews to Birkenau, only a few thousand were selected to work – the rest were killed upon arrival

• After the approach of the Russian Army, prisoners healthy enough to walk were forced on death marches where few survived. Those not healthy enough were left to die in the camps

• In April – May 1945 the camps were finally liberated, and few were prepared for the horror of what was discovered there. They found 7,650 sick and weak prisoners left in the camps

• Today, from the 3.5 million Jews who lived in Poland before the Nazi occupation, only 6,000 Jews remain in Poland

• Before the occupation, Jews numbered 58% of the population of the town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz), no Jews live in the town now

Auschwitz-Birkenau – A Personal Experience

It’s extremely difficult to look beyond the facts and figures of the Holocaust and see the victims as individuals, but that is what they are. Each person murdered at the hands of the Nazis had their own personality, their own family and their own unique story. Whilst elements of their stories converged, they were all different experiences of the same horrific event. Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau was the first time that I truly tried to comprehend the depth of the destruction and despair of the Holocaust.

Approaching Auschwitz is one of the most bizarre and disconcerting experiences of my life. It’s just completely unfathomable to see a preserved execution centre, complete with its barbed wire and electrical fencing, in the middle of a bustling city. As tourists and outsiders, holocaust survivors and relatives stare on at the site in disbelief, the rest of the population of Oswiecim go about their daily business – raise their children, maintain their careers, marry and love around the site where approximately 1.25 million people lost theirs lives. I could never really accept this place as a part of the workings of the average day, waking up and opening my curtains to see those barbed wire fences staring back at me.

Stepping inside those gates is easy. The group of sixth formers I’m with are still talkative with sleep-deprivation and I’m still too confused by the busy schedule of the day. It is not until we’re led to those signature gates, the ones which read ‘Arbeit Mach Frei’ or roughly translated – ‘Work Brings Freedom’ (which of course it did not, unless the freedom described here was death), that I truly begin to realise I am at the site of such atrocities.

Auschwitz itself is very odd; the buildings under normal circumstances could be considered that of a normal rural Polish village. In fact its original purpose was serving as Barracks for the Polish army. It is also buzzing with tourists, hundreds of people flock daily to Auschwitz to see the terror for themselves, as they say – seeing is believing. It’s disturbing, to say the least, when you see people sat around the site of Auschwitz munching on sandwiches and chatting cordially between friends, compared to our group of sixth formers who shuffle around the place in near silence.

As many people have remarked from their visits to Auschwitz in the past, it is an eerily quiet place. A silent cloud falls over those who visit it, and all that can be heard is the quiet murmurings of the Polish guides, telling of the horror of the place you see before you. Speaking almost appears a sign of disrespect, and the silence is only broken between the groups when facts are muttered under the breath in disbelief.

Aside from the oppressive nature of the double barbed wire fence, which in its time was also electrified, the most notable and disturbing sights in Auschwitz remain in the museums - it is here that we walk first.

The bottom floor of the first museum is rather traditional, photographs of the site in its active state fill the walls, and extracts and documents sit in glass cases. It’s not until we walk into one room with a glass case that you really feel how different this museum is. In that glass case sits the collective ashes of 1.25 million people. The container is relatively small, given the enormity of its contents.

We walk past and file upstairs where we see a model of the crematoriums of Birkenau; we turn to the right and see empty canisters of Zyklon B – the remains of something which was used to kill millions of people in the gas chambers.

My memory is fuzzy on the exact locations of the rest of the things we see inside various parts of the Auschwitz museum, all I remember are the sights themselves – the rooms full of suitcases (our guide tells us that once when she was doing this same tour a woman spoke out, an Auschwitz survivor, that she could see her suitcase with her name written on it), rooms full of pots and pans, rooms full of such every day things as glasses, tooth brushes and hairbrushes – indications that the people who met their deaths here had no idea what was happening, they really did think they were being ‘relocated’ to the East.

The more shocking sights are also set out in this same manner, the rooms with glass dividers putting a shield between the visitors and the horror. One room contains false limbs, crutches and other aids for disabled people. We are told that these were forcibly removed before the owners were sent to the gas chambers simply for being old or disabled.

Other rooms hold the clothes of babies, executed on arrival for being too young to work and born into the wrong race or group. A female teacher, a member of our group, walks up to the glass cabinet which contains the children’s clothes and tiny little shoes; she turns away with tears filling her eyes.

Another room holds the hair of the hundreds of thousands of women who were shaved upon arrival to the camp. There is little distinguishing between the colour of the hair through aging, but it is difficult to truly grasp that this hair was taken from the heads of women to humiliate and dehumanise them. The hair did not go to waste though, the hair that lies in the Auschwitz museum is that which was found upon the liberation of the camps. The rest of the hair previously taken was sent to the German army to be used in clothing, the hair of these women was used as another textile material, not unlike wool to keep the backs of their persecutors warm.

The most moving experience of Auschwitz itself for me though, was the rooms full of shoes. The shoes were divided between shoes of children and shoes of their mothers. It is the mothers’ shoes which really speak to me. I walk around the room, brimming with these shoes and stare at them. At first I see them as a mass, like the statistics of the Holocaust it’s hard to see the individuals. It isn’t until I stop to truly assess what I’m seeing before me that it hits me.

The majority of shoes are practical dark leather shoes which would have been suitable to work in. A large quantity of them however are beautifully decorated, absurdly impractical shoes – brightly coloured summer sandals, delicate high heeled shoes. These women did not know their fates when they dressed for their new life, some wanted to look their best – take their best shoes with them, other women took their most practical shoes. These shoes each have their stories to tell, and they are the last remains of the individual women who walked in them, who were forced to remove them and walk to their death.

Another hard hitting truth is the walls of photographs inside one part of the museum. After the introduction of the ‘Final Solution’, the SS soldiers documented each prisoner by taking their photograph and assigning a number. After the number of prisoners increased, this became inefficient and costly and soon instead prisoners were simply tattooed with their prisoner number. The guide tells us how after the liberation of the camp, some of the children had been at the camp so long that when asked their name they answered with their number.

These aren’t just photos of a crowd awaiting their deaths; these are photos of the individuals involved. Each looks at you with a different prospective, the prisoners stare out from the photographs, all bald including the women and with varying expressions. Some look on in confusion, others in some cruel and confused moment smile on – perhaps at the novel sight of a camera, or perhaps because by now they know this will be their last photograph. Small children stare out from the photographs too, with toothless expressions and childish innocence.

Underneath the photographs are two dates – date of registration into the camp, and date of death. Some of these dates are mere weeks apart; others lasted years of cruel torment. The average life span of a woman in the camp was 3 months, and a man 6 months.

Our guide tells us that on one of her tours, a man asked if he could get a copy of one of the photographs. Puzzled, the guide asked why. The man replied saying that his mother was on the wall, and that he had no other photographs of her. He was given a copy of the photograph of his mother.

Not just work and execution took place in these camps. ‘Scientific’ experiments took place here too, especially on twin children. One of these so-called scientists wanted a way of creating the perfect race by editing genes rather than selective breeding. He wanted to turn the average person into an Aryan. He injected poisons into the eyes of children with the aim of turning their eyes blue, of course this didn’t work and the children instead turned blind.

Other experiments involved seeing how long humans could survive without food. Twins were starved to death for the sake of ‘science’. Photographs of these starving twin girls sit staring at you from the walls of the Auschwitz museum. Experiments were done here which could not have been done in the outside world, the people instead treated like animals, lab rats.

As we walk through the site we have the SS troopers’ club pointed out to us. In the background of this club, where the soldiers who committed murder daily enjoyed a drink, the chimney of the crematorium can be seen.

It is difficult to comprehend a person being able to sit and enjoy a pint of beer whilst thousands lie in suffering. Another disturbing sight is that of the house of Adolf Eichmann, not only did this man live in the camp where millions of people lost their lives; he also raised his three children there with his wife. His wife loved Auschwitz, and apparently described the place as ‘paradise on Earth’.

Despite Birkenau being an addition to Auschwitz, the two camps couldn’t be more different. Whilst Auschwitz has the semi-rural community feel to it, Birkenau is raw and unaltered. What you see before you is how it was in the time. We walk up to the watch tower and before our eyes is the disturbing vastness of Birkenau. Hundreds of wooden huts, vast expanses of land which prisoners were forced to work on in all weathers fill the horizon.

Once back down from the tower, we are taken to the platform next to the train lines which led people directly into the place that most would spend the rest of their short lives. It is here that the people became prisoners, the names became numbers, their personal items were stripped from them and they were given their sentence – life or death, left or right. Families were split apart, mothers and younger children on one side – death, fathers and older children fit to work on the other – life. Mothers, babies, children, the disabled, the old, pregnant women, the mentally ill – all were sentenced straight to death.

The cabins in here are very different to those back in Auschwitz, they’re completely made of wood and we’re told up to one thousand people slept in each cabin. There are bunk beds with three layers, but these would have been far from comfortable as seven people shared a layer and slept on beds of straw. Most days people woke up to find one of their bunkmates dead. Death here however was regarded as prolonging the lives of those who remained. A good pair of shoes was more highly regarded than a life, and could be the difference between life and death in the camp.

Toilets were limited at best, with rows of stone tablets with holes serving as toilet facilities. We are told that time to use them was restricted, and so the thousands of people would clamber to use a toilet. The people here were treated more like animals than humans, and many had to sit in their own mess until their death.

Birkenau is also home to the huge crematoriums and gas chambers. However, all that remains now is rubble, as the Nazis blew up the crematoriums in an attempt to hide the horrific sins they committed here. In front of the crematoriums sit four stone tomb stones in different languages; the site marks the huge crater which lies behind the stones where the ashes of over 1 million people lie. Still today bones lie in this pit, small specs of white amongst the mud and water.

The gas chambers themselves are odd. Underground are the steps which led you to the changing rooms, where prisoners were forced to strip and told to remember their peg numbers to easily find their possessions when they returned from the showers - just one of the examples of a never ending stream of lies fed to the prisoners even until the end of their lives.

They were then driven naked into the showers, when SS soldiers would pour gas through the roof and instead of showers prisoners were asphyxiated. Within twenty minutes they were all dead. Thousands of people per time were piled in a pyramid – the weakest at the bottom (usually the children) and the strongest at the top depending on how long it took to die.

Workers in the camp, the victims themselves, then had to take the bodies of their friends and of their people to the crematorium on carts, the same carts which were used for their sparse supplies of food from the kitchens.

Walking out of the camp a free person is not without guilt. It is extremely bizarre to have the ability to walk straight out of the camp without fear, and to enter the camp voluntarily would be regarded at the time as insanity. Apparently at the time prisoners remarked that the only way to leave Birkenau was through the chimney of the crematorium.

The sights of Auschwitz-Birkenau are horrific to see, and by the end of the day all the visitors are left feeling slightly numb. It’s difficult to talk about your experiences at the camp, as everybody experiences it in a different way. It is almost shocking though after visiting this camp that there are people who still claim that the whole thing is propaganda, completely created and exaggerated. I advise those people to go see the horror of the camps for themselves.

So why learn about the Holocaust? As Gordon Brown rather nicely put it on signing the Book of Commitment:

‘As the philosopher George Santayana said, ‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’ That is why we must remember the Holocaust - not only as a defining tragedy but as a warning - to rededicate ourselves to doing all we can to never allow this to happen again. We must pay tribute to those who perished and educate our children to take a stand against hatred, intolerance and persecution wherever and whenever it is found. In the words of Chief Rabbi Sacks, ‘We can not change the past but each of us, by challenging prejudice and tolerance, can help change the future’.

- by Jvickyb
31/03/08