Never Again, Never Forget

Hello friends. It is with a series of mixed emotions that I write this post. It has been one that I definitely want to share with all of you, but also an experience I don't know that I can adequately express in words. After reading several different memoirs, watching documentaries, and other books related to Nazi Germany, I somehow thought that I was prepared to visit this place- to walk through these grounds and see the remnants that speak to these atrocities. In a way, I was, but at the same time, coming through the courtyard and seeing the words fashioned into the entrance gate, "Arbeit Macht Frei", provoked different much emotions than I was expecting.

Sunday morning came early and we loaded up the bus for Oswecim, the town that houses the memory of the horrors of Jewish persecution during World War II. It is the sight of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II Birkenau. It is very surreal to drive to the camp as you are on a main road in the city and the bus turns into a parking lot right off of the street. Originally, when the camp was first established, the Nazis set aside 40 square kilometers for this camp complex, which today is surrounded by residential areas and town businesses. 

The camp operated as a concentration camp at the beginning of the war, occupying and taking shape in a former Polish army artillery barracks. Three goals of the camp were these: 1) to "incarcerate" real and perceived enemies of the Nazi regime, 2) to have access to a supply of forced labors who could be deployed for war related purposes, 3) and the last being- to exterminate certain identified racial and ethnic groups. While Auschwitz began as a concentration camp, the shift to extermination began in 1941, when Nazis began to test their gas on Soviet POWs. Two years later, Auschwitz was fully operational as a death camp, housing gas chambers and crematoriums to serve these purposes.

May 1945 marked the end of extermination in Auschwitz as the Red Army arrived to liberate these hollow and withering skeletons- completely speechless by the sight in front of them. In 1947, Auschwitz was set aside as a national state museum and has functioned as such since then. Throughout the reign of Nazi terror, approximately 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz, and of that 1.1 people were exterminated- from all different racial and ethnic backgrounds, but mainly Jews. 

When you arrive in the parking lot, it is an interesting view outside the bus window. There are tons of people there from all different areas throughout the world- here to make their way beyond the concrete wall that surrounds the camp, and see what lies behind it. Because you are not allowed to go to Auschwitz without a tour guide, Pierce, Jared and I went to the window to get our tickets and then move towards the next station to receive a headset and audio player. Your tour guide, who is very knowledgeable about the camp itself, guides your journey by wearing a microphone with her words then going to to your headset as you walk through the camp.

As we waited for our guide, I stood off to the side of the visitor complex. Looking out through the small openings in the windows towards the courtyards. I had read enough to know what had happened behind this wall but was surprised by what came next. As our group of about 30 English speakers made our way outside the complex, we were greeted by those taunting words, "Arbeit Macht Frei". I did not even make it all the way to the sign before I was choking back tears; the realization of what this place symbolizes hit me. Innocent people were murdered here and I was now walking the roads that they suffered on before they met their death. I had had similar moments to this while walking throughout Warsaw and Kraków, where I realized so much history had taken place in these two cities. But this was far different; this consuming feeling of being where both the guilty and the innocent had roamed, shut off from the world, yet such atrocities occurring here under false pretenses.

As we passed under the gate, I purposely took a couple steps back from the group, wanting to feel that despite being with others, I was experiencing this for myself, not necessarily with 25 other people. We made our way first into preserved blocks, the first of which detailed extermination. From drawings on the walls to enlarged photographs, these big empty rooms were barren, whose walls functioned to surround you with visual representation of what occurred in these places. Moving room to room, you saw the sorting process of when Jews first arrived and from the holding platform, how they were ushered to their death. As your guide is talking, you do need to maintain a certain distance to hear what she is saying in order to hear her explanations of these artifacts. Because I had dropped back from the group a little, our guide, Kate's words became muffled and I couldn't fully understand what she was saying- the only word I managed was: hair. 

You walk into this empty room, whose white walls surround you except for one wall that is glass. Almost instantly, you are confronted with the nearly two tons of hair from the prisoners that was taken before they entered the gas chambers. Rounding the room, I managed to stay fixed on this glass, while as I made my way to the other side, I was now looking at the faces of those who were just setting foot in the room. Their contrasting reactions to being confronted with this physical evidence- some mesmerized, unable to brake their gaze, while others looking briefly, then turning away. There were other moments such as this with the collections of glasses, shoes, suitcases, and toiletries- but none so poignant as this one.

Our next place was home to Nazi medical experimentation, especially the work of Josef Mengele and his experimentation with twins. According to our guide, it was a belief of Mengele's that twins had some sort of innate ability to be cloned, which in the broader context of the German agenda, would be paramount in helping to propagate the believed superior Aryan race. While you are not allowed to wander inside of the rooms, the impact of looking inside from a hallway lined with prisoner photos amply presents you with the picture of such senseless tragedies.

One of the last and final places was the prison where many prisoners were not sent there to be detained, but rather to die. The above photo with those two wreaths is the wall that Jewish prisoners would stand against for their executions. The windows of the opposing building that bordered this courtyard were covered so those inside that building could not glimpse at the freshly pierced corpses. In the basement, you are led to see the cells of the former prisoners. There were three types of cells in Auschwitz- 1) suffocation with little room for air exchange, 2) standing cells, and 3) starvation cells, all of which housed prisoners until they perished.

One particular story was - again, another emotion provoking moment of my day. Following roll call one morning, an SS guard identified seven Jewish prisoners that would be crammed into a standing cell together until they died. One of these prisoners, upon hearing his fate, begged the German guard, pleading for his life and saying, "I have a wife and children- you cannot kill me!" Another prisoner, hearing these words, approached the German guard, and offered to take this man's place. I'm even getting goosebumps now as I write this. The willing prisoner turned to his fellow man and told him that he had already lost everything and that the Nazis had killed his family. The man whose life had been spared, unable to thank him enough, tried with what he could to express his gratitude as he watched these seven ushered through the doors of the prison. These men, all in this cell together, slowly began to die from starvation, while this man who had taken a fellow prisoner's place, outlived everyone, surviving for fourteen days. Tired of him, the Nazis finally drug him out of this cell and executed him along that brick wall. As you wander into the basement, you see a gravestone for this man- a reminder of his sacrifice in saving his fellow man. It is now adorned with flowers and candles, objects bearing tribute to his memory.

The final place in Auschwitz I that our group went was the gas chambers. I recognized it from descriptions I had read in various accounts- thinking of what it must have been like for them to approach this place, sentenced to their death and seeing the chimney expelling the remnants of their fellow prisoners. As I made my way through the door, following the other members of my group, I walked into a small holding area where these men and women were told to undress before being led into the shower room. Following the progression of this structure, I walked into the gas chamber itself and stood in the corner, silent. I thought of the emotions that these walls had born witness to- fear, terror, sadness, panic, just to name a few. What utter tragedy and senseless atrocity. From looking at the faux shower heads lining the walls to observing the small openings in the ceiling, I can only imagine the last bit of light they saw before there's was extinguished. After this gas chamber, I followed this room to the next-the crematorium. The remnants of two formerly operational ovens stood frozen in time, abandoned by the prisoners who had been forced to extract the bodies following each gassing.

The sharp contrast of the blazing sun meets you as you emerge from this dark structure. This building concluded our tour of Auschwitz. Our tour guide, Kate, told us to take a short break, and assemble in the parking lot where we would be met by a bus taking us to Birkenau. 

We were crammed on this bus, with what seemed like at least 75-100 other people, who were joining us for the short distance to Birkenau. As we were approaching the camp, you could see the brick gate that once had towered over trains of innocent people arriving at their fate. I was struck with the mirroring image of these tracks against the top of these bricks, red with sunlight. Because we had purchased a tour, Kate led us up the stairs to the top of gate so that were given a better picture of the expanse of this camp, reaching far and wide. I was in complete disbelief of the sheer size of it- the women's barracks to the left and the men's to the right, only separated by abandoned train tracks with a single railway car.

After descending the stairs of the entrance, we walked through the center of the camp. First we stopped at the holding platform, the place where prisoners had flooded from the train cars into the camp, often some being beaten to death or executed after the SS opened their doors. These prisoners were sorted with the simple direction of a thumb gesture, directing them one way or another, and in the process, often forever separating families. The women and children, along with the elderly, were the first to get sent to the gas chambers. Following them were struggling laborers in the subsequent days and months that were chosen at the discretion of the guards, who would live and who would die.

We followed the tracks to the very back of the camp where a rather large memorial has been erected to those who perished in Auschwitz- Birkenau. It is quite long and symbolizes different forms of burial from European countries whose people perished in Auschwitz. Each form of burial has a plaque in that country's language that reiterates the same message.  At the end of this structure is a large chimney, serving as a representation for those who were burned in the camps. This is the English translation:

Off to the left side of the memorial are the ruins of Crematorium II, destroyed by the Germans wanting to expunge any evidence of these crimes that had taken place here. Indeed, these ruined buildings pay tribute to the million lives exterminated in this place.  Our group followed this structure around to the very back of the camp, where there are four tombstones that stand before three small ponds.

The ponds pictured here were where the prisoner's ashes were deposited. Following the establishment of Auschwitz as a museum in 1947, our guide explained that any remaining ashes found in the camp were also deposited into the pond as a means of preserving the memory of the million who died here.

The rest of our tour of Birkenau allowed us to wander into both the women and men's barracks, followed by the sanitarium. Each building playing an integral role in these terrors, and making sure to stop and remember these million people in each building. Each man or woman or child had spent time in this place, whether minutes, hours, days, months, or even years. They deserved silence and purposeful remembrance as we all wandered through.

The sanitarium was the last stop in our tour for the day. We exited the camp, got back on the bus to Auschwitz and then another bus to Kraków. The whole time home, I sat on the bus reflecting on the day, where I had walked, and what I paused to remember. And so it was that I left Auschwitz, thankful for having the opportunity to see these places, but also deeply saddened by what I saw- the reality of the Holocaust visibly in front of me. As strange as it sounds, those words of the memoirs I've read also seemed to follow me throughout my day, once again lending their voice as a way of remembrance to such atrocity- these survivors' words breathing life into my experience. This day will be something I never forget, for such atrocities should never happen again.