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The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again.
Auschwitz….what does one say about such a place? I navigated my group of six through the streets of Krakow this morning, thankfully able to read the map and not getting lost in the limited time we had to get the Cracow city tour bus. We got on the bus and then were driven out to the largest concentration camp from WWII, a place in which 1.3 million people had been exterminated.
We arrived and were handed over to a local guide, it was a miserable day and raining lightly, actually I couldn't have imagined this place any other way. We trekked into the Auschwitz one camp and were taken through a series of barracks in which the prisoners used to be kept. We saw the awful conditions in which they slept, one the floor on hard concrete, sometimes seven hundred to a room. We were shown cells in which people were made to stand for up to ten hours, cells no bigger than one square meter and often four people were shut in there at once.
In one of the barracks was a wall with the pictures of the so called criminals housed in the building, Jews, Political Prisoners, Soviet prisoners of War, Poles, Gypsys, Homosexuals…seeing their faces really brought it home and made it very real. Though the worst was yet to come….
Inside another barracks was a mountain of human hair which had been shorn from the prisoners before they were admitted, hair used to make rope, socks and other industrial materials. In the barracks next door was a huge pile of empty Zkylon B gas containers which had been used to execute prisoners in the gas chambers. Another barracks was filled with shoes, all brown, except one red ladies shoe that stood out amongst the others. A lone red shoe. The only trace left now that this woman had ever existed. I wondered who she was, if she'd had a family…but mostly about her crime, the crime for which she had been sent to this place. Punished because of her race or her faith. It also made me think about racism back in Australia. People really have no idea what real prejudice is these days, how could anyone accuse us of racism, when places like this existed only seventy years ago.
The worst of the barracks at this camp was that in which the suitcases were held. Suitcases that had been taken from the prisoners on arrival. It wasn't actually the suitcases themselves, it was the names on the suitcases. Seeing the name in that person's own hand writing, I can't even describe it.
After the barracks we trudged through the rain to an open courtyard with a cement wall at the end. This is where people had been executed for the most trivial of offenses. Walking too slow, having dirty clothes, because the officer felt like it…. There were also two poles on which people had been strung up by their wrists, while their hands were tied behind their backs, their shoulders dislocated and then they were unable to work, so they also, were shot.
The last stop at Auschwitz one was the only remaining gas chamber and crematorium. I feel whatever I write here couldn't possibly do it justice. I can't believe I stood in a chamber in which literally tens of thousands of people had died. The holes in the ceiling were still present, into which the gas containers had been dropped. The crematorium was cold and mechanical, furnaces lined the walls, this was a place designed to exterminate 8000 people an hour….literally a death factory.
After Auschwitz one, we got back on the bus for a short drive to Auschwitz two, Birkenau. This was the largest of the camps and contained four gas chambers and crematoria, compared to the other camps one. Most of this site had been destroyed by the Nazi's to cover up the evidence, but the size and scale of the place were certainly enough to make an impression.
The train tracks fed right into the Birkenau camp, people were sorted into groups, those able to work pointed to the left and taken to Auschwitz one and seventy five per cent pointed to the right and exterminated in the gas chambers then and there. These people included the elderly, pregnant women, the disabled, children and babies.
It was a really wet day and the Birkenau camp was very muddy and I was quite cold during the whole experience. When I was getting soaked by the rain, I felt it was not right to complain, when I trudged through the mud I felt it was my due to get dirty, when my hands got so cold I couldn't feel my fingers, I didn't jam them into my pockets to keep warm. I wanted to suffer in any way I could, because they suffered.
I was never going to enjoy today, but it has been and I think always will be one of the most powerful experiences of my life.
After the tour and managing to get everyone back to Krakow in one piece, I went for lunch with a couple of the passengers, I had potato pancakes and pork. We stayed in there for most of the day, as it was still miserable outside. We got the night train to Prague at 10pm, it was sleeper cars and there were three bunks to the room. I got the middle one and kept waking up in the night as the train kept stopping. Ah the joys of travel.
- comments
Mum Oh, Kristina, I knew this would be a harrowing experience for you and I couldn't stop thinking about you in this place and how you would feel. Like I said, I wouldn't envy you this tour, it was bad enough for me when I visited Yad Vashem (the holocaust museum) in Jerusalem. So, so sad! I cried when you wrote how you wanted to suffer too. I was nice to know that I had brought up a child with so much compassion in her heart. *hugs*