A harrowing walk around Auschwitz-Birkenau

Having spent so much of our adult lives hearing, living, breathing and being immersed in Holocaust memory and commemoration, we were nevertheless largely unprepared for our visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau earlier this month.

As we drove from Krakow to Auschwitz, all we saw on either side of the road were glorious tree-filled forests – a landscape in many ways so inconsistent with the horrors that were committed there. We visited the tiny town of Oswiecim where 12,000 people were living before the war. 8,000 were Jewish. 193 returned after the war. There are now no Jews in this town.

And then we arrived at Auschwitz. We walked under that sinister “Arbeit Macht Frei” entry gate and were struck by the death camp’s size. So as to cope with the industrial scale of the killing machine that was Auschwitz, the pre-existing camp was expanded, reclaiming land from residents of neighbouring areas. Buildings that housed prisoners remain in place in neat rows. We walked the gravel roads between the buildings with the knowledge that we were stepping where 1.1 million Jews – including our grandparents – took their last steps in 1940-1944. We touched the same brick buildings and barbed wire fencing that trapped our grandparents. We entered buildings to see torture chambers where Jewish prisoners were starved and where others were suffocated. We saw interrogation rooms where casual decisions were made determining whether the prisoner would be immediately executed or forced to suffer further confinement. We saw the building where horrific, depraved medical experiments were undertaken on young children – with twins and young girls sought out for special attention.

We walked down a long gravel road towards one of the crematoria and saw photos of young children skipping down that same road 80 or so years earlier holding hands unknowingly on their way to the gas chambers. They were dead soon after that photo was taken. The photographs/images that are inside many of the rooms that we were guided through were taken secretly and at great personal risk to their safety, by two prisoners who knew they had to find a way to make known to the world what was going on in the camp. Shockingly, 216,000 Jewish children were murdered in Auschwitz.

We saw mounds of Zyklon B canisters that the perpetrators threw into the concrete gas chambers to poison Jewish prisoners – men, women and children. We were told the Nazi murderers waited 30 minutes or so for the screaming to stop before turning on the ventilation and then removing the bodies. They still had to be disposed of – dragged from the chambers outside and thrown into hastily dug mass graves. We saw mounds of crockery pots, shoes and suitcases – often all that was left of those who were murdered. We saw mounds of human hair sent from Auschwitz to outside factories and then used to make cloth.