Visit to Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II Birkenau — because the past must not be forgotten
Recently my husband and I visited Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp from the ’40s, located in Poland. Even if you are not passionate about history and even if you do not know much about what happened in the camp during the Second World War, it’s impossible for me to believe that you have not heard of the Holocaust, of the Aryan race, of Hitler’s desire to purge the Jews, Roma, and other nations that he does not consider pure.
A few years ago I simply devoured any reading on the subject of the Holocaust — “Life after Auschwitz” by Eva Schloss, “Escape from Auschwitz” by Joel Rosenberg, “The Librarian at Auschwitz” by Antonio Iturbe, “The Tattooist from Auschwitz” by Heather Morris, “Renia’s Diary” by Renia Spiegel, “A Boy on Schindler’s List” by Leon Leyson, “Schindler’s List” by Thomas Keneally, “Cilkai’s Journey“ by Heather Morris, “When the Lilac Blooms“ by Martha Hall Kelly, “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” by John Boyle, “I Survived the death camp” by Eva Mozes Kor, Anne Frank’s Diary are just a few of the books on this theme that I read.
My husband is very passionate about history in general, so the idea to visit Auschwitz together, to see what remaines, to better understand the sad past and the human horrors that were committed in the small Poland town came naturally.
The visit to Auschwitz is free, but you must book your ticket on the website https://www.auschwitz.org/.
We started the visit from Auschwitz II Birkenau, the camp where over a million people, mostly Jews, were located, of which only a very small part survived. The first thing you see, as you approach the entrance, is the wall with the tower and obviously the train tracks, which are emblematic. As you get closer, you notice the high wire fences (which were electrified), as well as the multitude of observation posts, both around the camp and inside it.
After entering, we started the visit — the first thing that surprised us was the size of the camp, it’s huge, I think it will take you 20 minutes to cross it from one end to the other. We visited it in about an hour and a half (round trip, leisurely pace, with pictures breaks). Some barracks still exist today, and you can visit some of them. You can see the latrines, as well as some barracks where the Jews lived in inhumane conditions.
There were two stoves in each of these wooden shacks — or rather one stove, with two chimneys, but as the guide of a group (which we also heard) said, there was rarely wood for the fire. Most of the time, people warmed up with the heat emanating from their bodies.
But there are also dozens (or even hundreds) of barracks that have been demolished, there are only remnants of the respective stoves, which show you the size of the camp.
Although the camp is huge, it is also limited in small spaces — at no time could the Germans have been overtaken by riots, because the prisoners were surrounded, fenced in like cattle, in quite small spaces, with high fences, and those at the defense posts would have seen any attempt of escape. On one side there are the long and simple wooden barracks, on the other side are the brick houses where the SS guards lived. These houses are in quite good condition even now.
Walking to the end of the camp you will come across a monument raised in honor of the victims, with messages in several languages, including Romanian.
And from that place, if you go to the left, towards the SS residences, you will pass by the remains of the huge ovens that were used to burn the victims. The moment I reached that area, I felt sick and understood what the survivors were trying to describe in the books — that rotten, nauseating, and sweet smell that remains from the burning of a person.
The stones and ruins are still impregnated with this smell, so many years after the atrocities stopped, and it’s hard for me to understand how strong this smell was every day, when the furnaces were working at maximum capacity.
After leaving the camp, we went to the bus station, which runs every 10 minutes to Auschwitz I, the other Nazi camp, located about three kilometers away. Here I saw the gate with the famous inscription “Arbeit macht frei” (Work sets you free) and entered the camp, somewhere at 3 o’clock in the afternoon.
Although it is much smaller and more compact, with a lot of well-maintained brick buildings, a lot of atrocities took place in this place, of another level. Here are the cells where the victims of the Holocaust were persecuted, stripped, shot, and left to die of hunger.
People were interrogated, they were humiliated, injured, and in many cases taken to underground cells, in inhumane conditions. Some of them, considered initiators of various riots, were left to die of hunger in the respective cells.
We saw the cells, the straw mattresses they slept on, the bathroom where the women had their clothes torn off them before they were taken to the wall and shot. And this was a moment when I felt ill. There were moments when I felt a pressure in my chest, that I couldn’t breathe, I felt nauseous.
We also discovered the place where the lethal gas was tested on people, as well as a lot of rooms that try to keep in our memory those who perished in this tragic way. Rooms with pictures of the victims from top to bottom, pictures of people in the famous striped pajamas, halls with personal pictures — these are just some of the places that can be visited.
The atmosphere is oppressive — although I consider myself a rather strong person who does not get scared easily, the moments when I went down to the basement and saw the underground cells of the prisoners, as well as those when I visited the rooms that keep the personal belongings of the victims (shoes, mountains of shoes, glasses, corsets, wooden legs, pots, kettles and all kinds of other personal objects) were moments with strong emotional impact.
Right before we left, we also discovered the crematorium, with the smoked ceiling, where the victims were burned. Somewhere around 4 o’clock, when it starts to get dark, the atmosphere is sinister.
You will not see children in these places. You won’t see large, noisy groups. You won’t hear laughter. You won’t see people buying souvenirs and taking pictures of themselves smiling. You won’t hear music; you won’t be able to buy food or ice cream here.
Here you come in quietly, you are horrified by the atrocities, you feel sorry, you feel sad, you want to cry, and at the end you breathe a sigh of relief that you are a visitor, that you came to understand what happened here, and you are not living during that period, you are not a prisoner, but you can go out freely from this space surrounded by two rows of barbed wire fences, plus another high concrete fence.
I don’t ever want to go back even if I had the opportunity, but I don’t regret coming and having this experience.
A more extensive article, with more pictures, can be found on my blog — CityFemme.com (in Romanian).
