A MUST-SEE IN POLAND: AUSCHWITZ

DIRGE FOR THE FALLEN

If you could go to only one place in Poland, make it Auschwitz. The setting for the most massive murder campaign in history, it recounts in raw detail Nazi Germany’s operation to wipe out the Jewish population of Europe during World War II.

On the outskirts of the town of Oswiecim, which the Germans called Auschwitz, occupying German forces built a concentration camp in 1940 that later grew into a complex of three main camps—Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Auschwitz III-Monowitz—and more than 40 sub-camps. The camps held prisoners for forced labor, and starting in 1942, mass slaughter.

Driving up to placid rows of farmhouses, one would never suspect this was Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where a million men, women and children were killed simply because the anti-Semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler regarded them as belonging to an inferior race and therefore a threat to German racial purity and domination.

But a sign outside one of its buildings provides a chilling reminder: “This barrack (the “Death Barrack”) was used for the special isolation of those women prisoners of the concentration camp who were selected by the SS as unfit for further work to be sent to be murdered in the gas chambers. Here they had to await their deaths, without food or water, and often for several days. Many died in the barrack before they were summoned.”

Close by, Auschwitz I, with its handsome buildings and wide interior roads and sidewalks, could pass for a university campus or well-planned subdivision, barbed wire aside.

An in-house guide explained: “Before World War II, they were originally 22 brick barracks for Polish soldiers. These were adopted by the Germans. Everything else was built by prisoners through slave labor.”

Largest camp

Auschwitz was the largest Nazi German concentration camp and death camp, receiving 1.3 million deportees from 1940-1945.

Throughout the world, Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, genocide and the Holocaust SIGN AT THE AUSCHWITZ CONCENTRATION CAMP COMPLEX

Of these, 1.1 million died in Auschwitz, most of them in the farmhouses converted into gas chambers. Zyklon B, a cheap gas used for killing rats, was used to kill the prisoners.

Jews from Poland, Hungary, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Slovakia, Belgium, Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia, Italy, Norway, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia met their deaths in Auschwitz. Yet photos of newly arrived Jews at the camp show them composed, waiting patiently in line with their luggage, with no hint of distress. They had all gone willingly to Auschwitz.

“They had been told they would be resettled in the East, with a new life and new jobs. That’s why they came peacefully,” our guide said.

But instead, on arriving, a man classified them based on appearance. Those who looked unfit for work were sent straight to their deaths. Outside the gas chambers, the new arrivals were persuaded to strip naked after they were told the chambers contained showers where they would be disinfected after their long journey.

Their clothes were reused by others. Their personal belongings were sorted in warehouses for reuse by German soldiers. Women with long hair had their hair cut because they were selling human hair to the German textile industry. Money in luggage was sent straight to the central bank of the Third Reich.

Those who didn’t die by gassing died of starvation, medical experiments, or execution by lethal injection, hanging or shooting. A yard in Auschwitz I contains the “Death Wall,” where prisoners condemned to die by shooting were executed naked by SS men.

No escape

“Escapees were executed by public hanging,” our guide said. Prisoners were counted twice a day. If someone was missing, the prisoners standing at roll call would wait for hours under the elements until the person or his corpse was found.

Some prisoners were executed in reprisal for the escapes of others. For instance, Polish Franciscan friar Maximilian Kolbe, now a saint, was among 10 men selected to starve to death after three men escaped. He was not originally picked; he offered to take the place of one of the selected men. When he survived two weeks without food, he was given a lethal injection.

For other offenses, like working in an unsatisfactory way, trying to access more food, or wearing the wrong uniform, prisoners were flogged, confined standing in small, dark cells where the flow of air was restricted, or tortured in other ways.

Although the Nazis cremated their victims, they couldn’t hide all the evidence. Luggage and 110,000 pairs of shoes left by the dead gave a glimpse of the scale of the murders here.

But there was poetic justice. After the war, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal tried and sentenced camp commandant Rudolf Hoss to death. He was hanged in Auschwitz I.

In 1947, the Polish survivors moved to make Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau a museum “as a warning about what one human being can do to another.”

Auschwitz shows us the depths of man’s depravity and what horrors can ensue when men follow blindly the dictates of demagogues.

HIGHVOLTAGE barbed wire fences kept the prisoners inside Auschwitz I.

DEATH WALL in Auschwitz I, where prisoners were shot. The wall is in a yard between Barrack (Block) 10, where medical experiments were conducted, and Block 11, the prison block where “erring” prisoners were held in small cells for punishment or death through starvation.

THE ENTRANCE to Auschwitz I features the words, “Arbeit macht frei” or “Work sets you free,” a mockery as the prisoners, who were subjected to forced labor, were aware that once inside the camp, the only means of escape was death. The massive operation to deport Jews from all over Europe to Auschwitz by rail proceeded without crowd control problems. Deceived, the Jews had gone willingly to Auschwitz.

GATE OF DEATH. The main entrance to Auschwitz II-Birkenau came to be known as the “Gate of Death” because freight trains carrying Jews rolled through this gate and into the camp where most of the Jews were killed within hours of their arrival.

THESE CANISTERS contained Zyklon B, the pesticide used to kill the prisoners in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. It blocked the oxygen, so the people died of internal suffocation.

A PHOTO in the museum shows Jews from Hungary arriving in Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1944. Hungary accounted for the bulk of the Jews deported to Auschwitz at 430,000.

CREMATORIUM in Auschwitz I where corpses were incinerated.

GALLOWS. At Auschwitz I, escapees were executed by public hanging.

SHOES AND LUGGAGE collected from the dead at Auschwitz.

GAS CHAMBER. This one-level structure in Auschwitz I houses a crematorium and the first gas chamber built in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. The killings later expanded to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where they could be carried out on a much larger scale.