Auschwitz

Auschwitz was...intense.

We went to Birkenau first. It's the largest of all the Auschwitz camps, and boy, you can tell. I couldn't see the end of the barracks when I was looking down just one lane. It was very grim.

Birkenau is significantly larger Auschwitz-1. But I suppose that wasn't big enough, because Nazi's stuffed 1000 people into buildings meant for 400. Birkenau's gas chambers are four times the size of those at Auschwitz-1. We didn't see them though.

This is the platform at Birkenau. In the distance you can see a train car. I was standing at about half the length of Birkenau here. Maybe that gives you some idea of how huge it is.

Doctors stood on the platform when incoming prisoners got off and immediately started separating them - healthy, unhealthy. They say that sometimes, it wasn't but 15 minutes after people exited the trains that they were dead in the gas chambers.

This is Auschwitz-1. Understandably, you are not supposed to take a picture inside the gas chamber. But I took this through the window, so... technically I kept the rules.

What you (sort of) see here is the creamatoria. The room to the the right of it was the actual gas chamber. In one room on the tour, we saw the cans of Zyklon B - the poison used to kill the prisoners in the gas chambers. The cans were probably the width of my hand and the depth of my palm. 7 of them was enough to kill 2000 people.

On the tour they showed us many rooms of items Nazi's had taken from the prisoners. Glasses. Shoes. Toothbrushes. Dishes. Clothes. Hair. Suitcases.

The room of suitcases struck me the 2nd hardest. Prisoners had put their names, DOBs, and country of residence on them. Suddenly, it hit home that these people were very, very real. They're not names in a textbook or a number to mourn over. They were people. Human beings.

Elijah Strüschte b. 1891 Deutschland

Ruth & Elinore Divrote b. 1919 Italia

Benjamin Antrentock b. 1931 Poland

These were the gates to enter Birkenau. I think they were called the Gates of Hell.

This is the infamous cell block 11. It's where all the torturous forms of execution occurred - as if gas chambers weren't bad enough. There were rooms where they stuck prisoners to die slow painful deaths; 3 rooms for starvation; one room where they knew there was a lack or proper oxygen supply, so that was used to long-term suffocation; and an interesting room that had 3 1x2.5sq meter cement boxes. You could only get into the boxes by crawling into them from a door that locked from the outside. Nazis would stuff up to 8 people in these blocks, forcing them to stand all night, and work all day. Stick one of your arms straight out in front of you, and one straight out to the side. That's about the the dimensions of the box. 8 people? yeah, right.

Block 11 had an outdoor version of torture as well. Outside there was an execution wall where the youngest known person to die was a 9yr old girl. They had poles where they'd hang prisoners from their arms - effectively dislocating their soldiers.

It was very grim to be there. We went through one barrack that had pictures of some of the prisoners who lived there. These photos had dates of entry into Auschwitz and dates of death. I was amazed at how long some people lived. 2.5 - 4 months seemed to be about average. I guess I thought it would have been longer, but no. There are not many known prisoners to have lasted more than a few years in the camps. Especially Auschwitz.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

-Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797)