Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau

The Auschwitz-Birkenau visit was one of the darkest moments of the trip. While all the communities we visited had been decimated by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Shoah, it was scary for me to visit the place most connected in worldwide imagination with the extermination of European Jewry.

As with Terezin-Terezinstadt, the Germans took the Polish city of Oswiecim and changed the name to Auschwitz.

The gate to the camp, as with other camps, indicates "Arbeit Macht Frei", work will make you free. This false promise contains here at Auschwitz a hidden message. Notice the 'b' in 'Arbeit' is installed upside down, an intentional protest message from the enslaved craftsmen who fashioned this metal gate.

It was a special privilege to visit this place with Abe Bowski, who was imprisoned here in Auschwitz I, Block 14. Rachel Blumenstyk's husband Myron was imprisoned here in Block 7. Here is the photo of Abe entering the camp.

Abe shows his prisoner number to the guide.

Abe in front of the Auschwitz I prison block where he was imprisoned.

For me, the most piercing photos displayed at Auschwitz are those of children and their parents. In this one photo of Jews at the time of selection, I noticed a mother and her baby each looking with deep suspicion, one to the left and one to the right. It is as if they know something is wrong but cannot tell what is wrong.

Here the eyes tell a painful, horrifying story.

The instrument of destruction, Zyklon B gas was used in the gas chambers. Body heat activates the agent.

The Nazis, in their ruthless efficiency, plunder currency from the prisoners. Here is one record:

Notice here the variety of plundered currencies: Polish Zwoty, Russian Rubels, US Dollars....

The Nazis collected everything from the prisoners: suitcases, shoes, hair and toothbrushes, dishware...

If the small foot of a child

The foot that takes its first step

To the smiles of parents and beaming skies,

If this foot is buried in Auschwitz mud

And a browning, forlorn shoe is all that remains

Then here will be a shrine, marking not the first step

But the last.

The double row of electrified barbed wires fences with guard posts all around, with concrete walls sunk below the ground to prevent digging, are forbidding as they arc toward the camp.

The only gas chamber/crematorium remaining at the whole Auschwitz complex is the one at Auschwitz I. The gas chambers at Birkenau, the killing center, were destroyed by the Nazis. Here is a photo of the crematorium - I could not bring myself to photograph the gas chamber itself.

Upwards of 1.1 (to a maximum of 1.5) million people were murdered at Auschwitz.

The gateway to gehennom, the Birkenau gate. Birkenau was constructed down the road from Auschwitz I as the killing center.

Guard towers line either side of the train tracks. The doors of the cattle cars open up and the dead fall out first. The SS doctors point to one direction or another, to the gas chambers or to a slower death by working. Here we see the 'judenrampe', the Jewish platform - the two main gas chambers were at the end of the train line just beyond view.

Birkenau is built on swamp land - as soon as there is significant rain, the whole area gets filled with mud and muck. After long days of slave labor, the SS guards might test a prisoner's mettle by asking him to jump from one side of the drainage ditch to another.

The barracks - hard wood 'beds', a stove that produced heat only if there was some coal...