Auschwitz-Birkenau

One Saturday, I took a study trip to Auschwitz concentration camp. I'm sure anything historical I say here, you'd be able to find a lot more information on Wikipedia, but I'm just going to tell what I saw and heard. When we arrived there we met with our guide and visited Auschwitz I which was the first part of the concentration camp, but made around a preexisting factory. The famous sign there said, "Arbeit Macht Frei," which means work will make you free, but was of course a lie. Right past the gate we saw the cafeteria where a band of the prisoners would play while everyone was counted everyday. In the inside, there were many buildings that used to be the places where the prisoners were kept, but that are now the exhibits. One exhibit made it clear how many people actually were killed in these concentration camps by showing what they left behind. There were piles of eye glasses, a whole room filled with suitcases (all had written big names and ages because people thought they would get them back), and a whole room full of pots and pans. The most disturbing room had piles oh human hair because I guess after women were killed they would shave off the hair and send it to textile factories in order to make fabric for jacket linings and blankets. There was also another exhibit that modeled how the gas chambers worked and how the bodies were burned. It was amazing to see that people would actually build a factory type thing with the sole purpose of killing a mass number of people. I found out that the people who had to process the bodies were the prisoners themselves who would end up in the gas chambers as well. The only thing the SS officers did was to drop the poison into the chambers; the rest the prisoners were forced to do.

We also saw exhibits on the types of people that would be sent to concentration camps including Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, POWs, and Jehovah's Witnesses. There were rooms full of pictures of the victims. Another exhibit showed the types of punishments that were used. A particularly frightening one was the standing cells where four people were crammed into a small room and forced to stand during the night while also working during the day.

We eventually made it to Auschwitz II in Birkenau, which was built once the first camp became too small for the Nazi's purposes. Auschwitz II was amazingly big and had many barn like cabins to hold all the people brought there. The railway that brought all the people there was right in the center. I guess as soon as people were brought there, the people were sorted into whether they would be killed or used for labor. The people who were immediately killed were the old, young, pregnant, and sick. These people were marched to the gas chambers and told that they were going to be able to take showers, which they believed since they had just been crammed into a boxcar. The healthy and strong people were taken to be washed up and then sent to the cabins. We toured one cabin and it had triple stacked bunk beds with a concrete form in the center that was supposed to hold enough heat from the fire to keep people warm. The wash houses were interesting to see because they had toilets that were just rows of holes in a concrete slab over a ditch. There was a memorial at the end that had a giant sculpture and terraces of bricks which had the same number of bricks as people killed. It really put into perspective who many people fell victim to this concentration camp.