Auschwitz

Auschwitz

For our second day in Poland we decided it was important for us to go Auschwitz.  I don’t want to say I was excited for this, because it is not something to be excited about, but I was really looking forward to seeing it.  Pulling into the camp, or Auschwitz I, you really don’t get a sense of how many terrible things took place there.  It seemed like a neighborhood with tons of brick buildings.  However, as soon as you seem the infamous “Arbeit macht frei” sign you begin to be overwhelmed with the terrible images of what took place at this camp.

Our first tour took us through the camp known as Auschwitz I.  Here they held prisoners and had a crematorium where they burned the Jews after gassing them.  The mood and feeling in the camp is unreal.  It seems as though the air is stagnant and it is hauntingly quiet.  While on the tour of this camp, which took a little over an hour, we were brought to several exhibitions in the buildings.  In each of the different buildings they showed us the massive stacks of shoes, suitcases, and/or hair all from the prisoners at the camp.  I have seen images in books of the collections the Nazis took from the Jews, but to see it in person instills a completely different emotion.  It was hard not to feel saddened and upset at the idea that these Nazi’s could be so cruel to another human being. 

 As we were toured through several of the buildings, the hallways were covered in the pictures of the jews that had been held as prisoners at the camp.  These images displayed when they had arrived as well as when they had died at the camp.  I have  never been so overwhelmed with so much death and such a terrible feeling in my stomach.  They showed us rooms where Jews were punished, including a room where 40 jewish prisoners would be placed in it with no windows for an extended period of time, and many of them would die from suffocation.  From there they brought us shooting wall where several prisoners were shot dead, the youngest being killed there only a small child.  The final stop on our tour of the first camps were was the cremetorium.  As we entered I immediately got a gutwrenching pit in my stomach and felt like my stomach had been tied in knots.  Its a feeling I can't explain to someone,  you just have to go there to experience it.  Absolutely horrible.

After Auschwitz I we were taken to the second camp known as Auschwitz II-Birkenau, or the main extermination camp in Poland.  Pulling in to the parking lot you were blindsided by the image you see in books, an entrance with railroad tracks.  This is what really got to me at Auschwitz.  It put a feeling in my body that I can’t explain but to this day will never forget how eerie and haunted I felt pulling into the camp and walking through the gates.  A part of me felt as though I was becoming a prisoner, which is nothing to what they actually felt. 

You look throughout the camp and all you see are rows and rows of buildings.  Just to think that these building were overpopulated with prisoners, and many of them never made it out alive.  They showed us inside the barricks, and the bunk beds in which 12 people would commonly sleep.  How they made it work as beyond me, I am still amazed that these people were able to withstand so much torture. 

Moving further along in the camp, we came to a train car,which had been used to transport the prisoners to the camp.  They packed so many people in these small little train cars that many died enroute to the camp because of unsanitary conditions, as well as suffocation. 
Finally the tour moved to the gas chambers and cremetorium.  There is only remains of these now because the Nazi's upon fleeing the camp blew up the buildings so no one would know what was going on.  It was devasting to see how massive these buildings were.  The Nazi's had planned out everything and even made sure they took precautionary measures they wouldn't get caught.  That to me is enough to make me want to throw up.  They obviously knew it was wrong and continuously went through with this massacre. 

In between the two cremetoriums is a monument dedicated to those who went through this horrendous event.  It was very moving to sit there and just reflect on what we had witnessed through the day. 

Although the tour was definitely worth it, I was a little upset by the amount of time we were given at this camp.  It felt extremely rushed, and I think that it is important for people to take their time in a place that is so filled with history and horrific events as a way to remember what happened and offer respect to those that came here and paid the ultimate price for something they couldn’t control.  The rest of our trip here in Poland was one in which we reflected on what we saw and took the rest of the trip easy.