Among a Million Ghosts: the horrors of Auschwitz

Warning: this post gets deep into the Holocaust and might be difficult for kids. Or anyone really. It sure was a tough day for me.

Several days ago, on Halloween of all days, Mu and I took the 2 hour train out of Krakow, Poland to Oświęcim, which is much better known by its name under the 3rd Reich, Auschwitz.

The name is synonymous with murder, destruction and the worst of humanity. We knew it would be a tough experience to go to the remnants of the camp and the day exceeded. Despite the horrors that we knew we would see and consider, it was a day that both of of us had dreaded but also counter intuitively looked forward to. That seems weird to write, and felt weird to think about as I mentally steeled myself for the day. Auschwitz is one of the specific places on earth where the nadir of what our species is capable of exist and that shared history, that horror must be confronted and the victims remembered. Over a million people died at these sites, some arriving at the camps less than an hour before they died in the super-sized gas chambers.

One of the most powerful moments of our day was walking the several hundred meters from the spot where Nazi doctors made the split second decision to either send Jews, dissidents, gays/lesbians, prisoners of war, Gypsies and any other undesirables to the gas chamber straight away or to the camp to be worked to death. Basically, any child younger than 15, their mothers, and any adult who did not seem strong enough to work was sent to die. 15,000 people per day.

From where the trains disembarked and the families were separated, we trudged the same path that the doomed children, women, and men had trudged -- along the train tracks. After several minutes, we reached the end of the line as the sun set spectacularly on the horizon. Along this walk, the Nazis went to great lengths to try and assuage the terror that those individuals must have felt.

As the individuals sentenced to die walked along the train tracks, they saw Gypsies with their families. The Gypsies had been instructed to give the appearance of happiness. They played music, dressed colorfully and behaved like all was well at Birkenau - Auschwitz. Then collaborators - prisoners that acted as intermediators between the SS and prisoners in exchange for favorable treatment - played soccer. All to make trainloads of people unsuspecting as they walked to their death. Once they arrived at the gas chambers, people were instructed to strip naked, so they could take a shower before they would get registered at the camp.

Once hundreds and hundreds of people were stuffed into the gas chambers, the poison was dropped on their heads. The gas used by the nazis required temperatures of 27 degrees celsius to convert from solid to gas, to do its horrific task. The heat of people stuffed into the terrifying space was used to kill them. Then, the bodies were moved into enormous gas chambers that burned so hot that they were basically vaporized. There are still ashes on the ground around the gas chambers and furnaces, where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people died.

This day was incredibly hard, and one that I will never forget. The only other place where I have felt the hallowness and sacredness was the battfield at Gettysburg.

Better than a thousand words

Thought it would be good to share a number of pics from that day, as my ability to explain is stretched to, or beyond, capacity.

This is the entrance to the original Auschwitz, which acted more like a concentration camp than a death camp. During the day, I came to realize that there were really two related aspects of the Holocaust as manifest at the camps. One was the immediate extermination of people right off the train, as I outlined above. The other was the working of people to death in the camps, extracting everything possible from the living and dead. This entrance is what people would have seen early in the war, and roughly translates to "work will set you free'. No one was set free from these camps, until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1945.

 

Below is one of the woman barracks, in which 8 woman were huddled on the top bunk and 8 were on the bottom. Poland is very cold in the late fall and winter, getting down to -20 degrees Celsius. This one barrack, maybe the size of a grange hall or a rotary club, held 800 woman. People were supposed to subsist on 250-300 calories a day, and some lost more than half their body weight.

 

Below are used up containers of the poison used to murder thousands and thousands. The gas was manufactured into solid pebbles, sort of like the stuff used in aquariums. It killed everyone in a chamber in 20 minutes.

 

Below is the first gas chamber used at scale in the Nazi empire. Thousands and thousands died here, 500 to 700 at a time. It took 2 days for all the bodies to be burned after each extermination. Now, the chamber is lit, but when it was put to its horrible use it would have been pitch black and incomprehensibly claustrophobic.

 

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