Visiting Auschwitz: ‘A horrific place with a horrible history’
Historian Jonathan Smyth recalls a recent trip to Poland in his recent Times Past column that brought home the atrocities in a concentration camp to life...
Easter seems like a suitable time to remember the less fortunate in our world. Recently, a visit to Poland put that thought into sharp perspective for my wife Pauline, and me. Our guided tour of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp on Wednesday, February 12, was a humbling and thought provoking experience for us and everyone in the group.
On a cold, but pleasant morning in Krakow we boarded the bus for Auschwitz. Like everyone else, I felt a sense of unease and wondered how I might react when we arrived. Auschwitz was the place where some of the most heinous activities of the Hitler regime took place. Nicholas, our tour guide for the day, at just 20 years of age, demonstrated the knowledge, and wisdom of someone far beyond his years. Over the course of the day, he brought home to us the enormity of the genocide.
The compassion with which Nicholas spoke of the victims contrasted sharply with the brutality of the German officers meted out to the men, women, and children. Like the Jews, others such as the Poles, Christians, Romani and Sinti, Jehovah Witnesses, gay people, the disabled, and many minority groups met the same fate. Initially, the gassing of disabled people in hospitals marked the Third Reich’s first foray into using this method of extermination. This was a way to reduce the burden of cost placed on the State and later using it to maximum effect in the concentration camps.
Jews who boarded the trains had been promised they would have ‘a better life’, with nice homes and good jobs awaiting them. This was all lies. The first trains had normal passenger carriages, but later on, families found themselves squashed into cattle wagons with standing room only and no dignity: the toilet simply became the place where they stood for the journey. People died in these wagons.
At Birkenau prison, passengers alighting the platform received orders to line up. The SS separated everyone into two groups. Then, a so-called ‘doctor’ rapidly decided everyone’s fate. The weaker bodied went into one queue and the stronger into another. Soldiers fooled the less able-bodied into thinking they were going for a shower and told them to strip and place all belongings in the locker room, before moving them towards the gas chamber.
We had an opportunity to enter a gas chamber ourselves and perhaps the most poignant moment was when the guide pointed up to the four holes in the ceiling. Nicholas explained that it was through these portals that the Nazis dropped the opened cannisters of ‘Zykon B,’ a hydrogen cyanide–based compound. Blurred photographs survive, secretly taken by young officers showing people rushing towards the gas chambers.
Much of what went on was governed by Hitler’s need for cost and efficiency. Too many ‘bullets’ were used in the beginning, so they found another solution, the gas chamber. Under the gaze of the SS the spoils were divided. They sorted through heaps of clothing, shoes, and kitchen utensils, taken from the Jews on arrival, and placed them into piles to be resold in industrial quantities to towns and cities. The money earned helped to finance the war effort.
The Nazis sold tonnes of shaved hair for manufacturing purposes. The Museum did not permit photography in certain rooms out of respect for the dead. We encountered a room containing vast amounts of hair and large rolls of what looked like cloth: this fabric was in fact made from human skin, used in clothing and other coverings for lampshades and chairs. The depravity of the Nazis knew no bounds.
They built a crematorium when the amount of dead bodies became unmanageable. The SS dumped the ashes in the nearby river and in the fields. A single urn on display contains the only surviving human ashes from the camp. We saw the execution yard and a so-called hospital, which stood beside it. Nicholas pointed out that it was only a hospital in name. In this building horrible activities were carried out on women including sterilisation.
At Birkenau, we saw Dr Mengele’s idyllic house overlooking the platform. They say, he watched the arrival of each new train for the purpose of selecting children for his diabolical experiments. By the end of the war, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. However, the Nazis attempted to destroy evidence and made the people walk what was termed a ‘death march’ during the middle of a freezing January.
Our excellent tour guide ended the day, by thanking everyone and telling us, that when we meet people in life, to be kind to them, and to remember that we are all human beings. The humans who were dehumanised and systematically wiped out by the Nazis did not have a chance, but we do have a choice in how we treat others as we journey through this life.
In 2020, Holocaust survivor and historian Mr Marian Turski, warned the world of how Auschwitz started. He spoke of how it crept into being ‘with small steps until what happened here, happened.’
He continued: ‘the Eleventh Commandment of the Bible should be “thou shalt not be indifferent” … Because if you are indifferent, before you know it, another Auschwitz will come out of the blue for you or your descendants.’
Visiting Auschwitz is an experience that my wife and I will never forget.
Final thoughts
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum records that in ‘Auschwitz, aside from 900 thousand Jews murdered in gas chambers, 200 thousand prisoners (half of whom were Jews) perished in the camp’. A total of six million Jews were murdered in the Nazis ‘state-sponsored genocide.’
Non-Jewish victims killed included 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, approximately 1.8 million non-Jewish ethnic Poles, between 250,000 and 500,000 Romani people, over 310,000 Serb civilians, 250,000-300,000 people with disabilities (including 10,000 children) and other people such as Jehovah Witnesses, gay and bisexual men, German criminals, and many black people living in Germany.
For more on the subject you can consult the Holocaust Encyclopaedia at https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org
READ MORE TIMES PAST