This morning we set out for Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the hardest days of the trip. We were met by our long time guide, Wojciech Smolen. For those of you who aren’t aware, Auschwitz has become a tourist attraction and is extremely busy which at times can interfere with our learning. This year they unveiled the new parking and entrance to the property which we were very unsure about. It turns out that the new entrance procedure is exceptional. They took away all of the parking at the main gates and the hundreds of people that would be waiting to get in by creating a parking facility across the street with an underground tunnel to get to the main entrance. The tunnel sets the tone for the visit by reading names of victims. It also allows the museum to stagger groups through so visitor aren’t impacted by large crowds.

As we entered Auschwitz I Wojciech utilized a model of the entire camp system to explain the use and function of the camp. Auschwitz I has 28 brick buildings, called Blocks, which served as barracks. The camp is 200 meters long by 300 meters wide. There were 700-1000 people housed in each building. The capacity of Auschwitz was 20,000 inmates.  

The living conditions in the camp were severe – hard work, starvation, disease and brutal treatment – so that the average time between one’s arrival in Auschwitz I and his death was about 2 months. In the 5 years of the operation of the cam, an estimated 1.3 million people arrived and 1.1 million were murdered. 90% of the victims were Jewish and most of them never saw the sign, Arbeit Macht Frei as they were taken straight to Auschwitz-Birkenau and gassed. An urn with a small amount of human ash in Block 4 symbolizes the loss of all these lives.

We were shown glass cases which housed documentary evidence of the registration process at Auschwitz. One case held samples of questionnaires which were required to be completed by the new arrivals: basic personal identification, occupation, but also such questions as how many gold teeth one had. Only 400,000 prisoners received numbered tattoos. One million victims of the camps were never prisoners of the camp; they were never registered. Wojciech spoke to us of the example of Anne Frank, who is not counted among the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was transported here, registered, given a number, but then was transported to Bergen-Belsen where she died. We were also shown several pictures of the arrival and selection process of a transport of Hungarian Jews which arrived in 1944.

In one photograph piles of personal belongings which had been carefully packed and carried by the new arrivals in their suitcases were being sorted into piles. These possessions would be stored in warehouses which were called “Canada”. Why Canada? A well-known Polish author had travelled pre-war extensively in and written about Canada as a land of opportunity, full of chances for wealth (describing the gold rush). Prisoners regarded working in the warehouses, sorting possessions as a good place to work because it was possible you might be able to find and eat some food from the suitcases or find something valuable which you might be able to trade. Also, the Nazis wanted the inmates handling clothing and other items which would be sent back to Germany, to be clean and therefore they had access to more hygiene than other prisoners. The average lifespan of a laborer in Auschwitz might be 3 months, but some who worked in the Canadakommando were able to survive for several years.

Another photograph shows a member of the Canadakommando talking to a woman who had just arrived on a transport. This was forbidden. The Nazis wanted to keep the Jews in the dark as long as possible about their fate to avoid any chaos or uprising, so having camp inmates pass along ANY information was dangerous and one could be punished severely, even with death. And yet, from memoirs, including Elie Wiesel’s Night, we know that some members risked this to help save Jews with valuable information.

In Block 5 were exhibited the ‘material evidence of crimes’: belongings brought by victims to Auschwitz, confiscated by the SS and found after liberation. Thousands of items, every one belonging to a man, woman, or child, murdered in the camp. Separate rooms contained shoes, artificial limbs and crutches, eyeglasses, prayer shawls, shaving kits, household cooking items, and other items which had been packed in their labeled suitcases.   25% of the victims in the camp were children (14 years or younger). 240,000 children perished in Auschwitz. Several cases contained baby clothes, dolls, and rattles.   In one long hall, with glass cases on either side from floor to ceiling were shoes – tens of thousands of shoes of different styles and sizes. These cases provided physical evidence of the existence of so many victims as well as giving us some insight into what they might have thought would be their future. Before a case of tins of shoe polish, Wojciech noted that these would be packed by men who thought they might need to be looking their best, to look for a job, providing evidence that the Jews were unaware of their fate as they packed their suitcases.

Before we entered a long room in which we were asked to take no photos, Wojciech said “Nowhere else can you be as close to the victims of the camp as in this room.” A wall-to-wall display case held more than 4,000 pounds of human hair. The hair was sold to textile manufacturers for production of army uniforms or gloves and socks for railroad workers. We were shown a bolt of fabric; 30% of it was made from human hair. We could see strands of hair protruding from the fabric.

Leaving Block 5, we were taken next to Block 7 which showed us the living quarters of the prisoners in Auschwitz.  Walking through the hall of the building we saw photographs of the predominantly Polish prisoners, women on the left and men on the right, with their name, prisoner number, nationality, date deported to Auschwitz and date of death.  We had been told that the average life expectancy of a prisoner in Auschwitz I was 2 months because of the harsh conditions and the pictures bore this out.  Intentional starvation was a goal of the Nazis; annihilation through work. Prisoners were allotted about 800 calories a day if they were lucky. The normal dietary needs of a person is 2,000 calories a day.

These photographs were taken as a part of the processing into the camp, most by Wilhelm Brasse, himself a prisoner.  He spoke fluent German and was a photographer before the war.  This made him useful to the Nazis who wanted good photographs of the prisoners as well as someone to take pictures at their private SS parties and of the experimental surgeries.  In this manner he was able to survive the war.  Why did the Nazis take pictures of the prisoners? Wojiech said that only Polish prisoners were photographed. They were traditional police photographs for purposes of identification should a prisoner escape. Only Poles were likely to try to escape since other inmates would be unlikely to survive without the ability to speak Polish, so they were not photographed. After Auschwitz began tattooing numbers on prisoners, the photographing of inmates was no longer required and was stopped.

Wojciech told us that it was traditional for a moment of silence to be observed at Jewish burial in memory of the departed.  If that were to be done for each person whose photograph hung in the corridors of Block 7, it would require 8 hours.  If this same moment of silence was to be observed for each of the 1.1 million victims of Auschwitz, it would take two and a half years.

In Block 11, which served as the prison for the camp we saw three types of punishment cells: dark cell, starvation cell and the standing cell. Time in a punishment cell could be a death sentence.   Downstairs we saw three types of special punishment cells: dark cell, starvation cell and the standing cell. The dark cells were used to punish prisoners who were seen as lazy. Ten to thirty people would be crammed into a dark cell and many would suffocate.   The starvation cell was essentially a death cell. Wojciech told us the story of Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan friar, who volunteered to take the punishment of another prisoner in a starvation cell and died. In that cell, in 1979 Pope John Paul II came and prayed and left a large candle to commemorate the spot. There were four standing cells in which three or four people could be forced to stand for days at a time. There was a gate at the bottom through which prisoners had to crawl and then stand up. They would leave the cell to go to work in the morning and return to the standing cell in the evening. This punishment could last three to four days and many died in the midst of the punishment.

One of the camp infractions was smoking which would give a prisoner 5 days in a special punishment cell. Smoking meant the prisoner had access to the outside world and was able to smuggle in contraband.   We were told that if one person escaped from Auschwitz, that 10 other prisoners would be brought to one of these cells and punished. 800 tried to escape and 147 people successfully escaped from Auschwitz which meant that over 1400 people were taken to Block 11 and starved. This was one of the reasons prisoners did not try to regularly escape; they did not feel they had the right to risk lives other than their own. In addition, if a prisoner escaped, his whole family could be killed in retaliation.

After leaving block 11, we viewed the execution wall, called the Wall of Death, between Blocks 10 and 11, where tens of thousands of prisoners were lined up naked and shot once in the back of the head.

We visited Block 27, an exhibit created by Yad Vashem which opened about 4 years ago. In the 1970’s the Auschwitz State Museum started allowing national exhibits to be set up in different blocks. Holland, Hungary, France and Belgium, for example, each have a special exhibit highlighting that nation’s experience during the Holocaust. Wojciech said the Israeli exhibit is aimed at non-Jewish visitors who are not familiar with the Holocaust, to create context for what happened in Auschwitz. The exhibit has three rooms: (1) Pre-War Jewish Life: in which Jewish life before the war (cultural, political, social, religious, private/leisure)is portrayed in film and pictures; (2) Nazi Ideology: has 6 screens which show Nazi propaganda speeches with subtitles in six languages; and (3) “Geography of Murder” shows the extermination camps as well as killing sites on a huge wall map. There are then an additional three rooms which commemorate the victims: (1) How Jews Coped During the Holocaust: short video clip testimony of survivors speaking of their individual Holocaust experiences; (2) Traces of Life: artwork and children’s drawing from the war years from camps, orphanages and hiding places which have been traced in pencil on the walls with background music of children singing and playing, and (3) The Book of Names: In a long room, a book as big as the room, fills two sides of thousands of pages, listing the names and some information such as place of birth and birthdate, place and date of death, if these were known, of more than four million documented Jewish victims of the Holocaust. This was a powerful exhibit for many of our students who found their own last name or the name of someone they knew in the book. At the end of the exhibit Wojciech told the students there are 4.2 million names in the Book of Names. He asked the students if you were to say one name every second, how many days would it take to read 4.2 million names. Kian did the math and came up with the answer of 48.6 days. We all stood there in amazement of how long it would take and the 4.2 million names is a partial number of lives lost during the Holocaust.

Our last stop in Auschwitz I was the site of the crematorium of the camp. There we saw the home of the camp commandant Rudolf Hoss where he lived with his wife and 5 children. At the end of war he tried to escape and hide but was discovered and a trial was held in Warsaw. Found guilty of war crimes, he was brought back to Auschwitz and publicly hanged on the gallows which stood before us, in 1947.  The gallows was used once — for his execution. Wojciech said that there were more than 8,000 individuals who administered the Auschwitz complex and that only about 700 were apprehended. 

As we entered Birkenau, Wojciech began explaining the details of the physical surroundings to allow the students to get their minds around the massive scope of this camp. We first went into the barracks which housed about 400 prisoners. It was here that the students realized the extremely poor living conditions as they thought about the size of their high school and fitting 400 people in such a small space seemed impossible. In the next barrack Wojciech explained the latrine system and how if you were the last person it became your job to clean the latrine at night.

We also saw the Czech family camp which Mr. Barmore had spoken to us about in Terezin.  The Czech Jews had been transported to Auschwitz to reduce the overcrowding prior to the Red Cross visit as part of the beautification project.  Once the visit had occurred, however, the Czech camp was liquidated and all of its inmates sent to the gas chambers.  Again, Mr. Barmore reminded us that the last thing the Czech Jews did before entering the gas chamber, was to sing the Czech national anthem.

We saw the remains of the Crematoria II which had been destroyed by the Nazis before fleeing. We were told that the capacity of the gas chambers was determined by the number of corpses which could be burned in 24 hours. At its peak, the crematoria could deal with 12,000 per day.

Crematoria III was covered and there are some restoration and excavation projects under way.

The last set of barracks we saw in Birkenau were housing barracks for female prisoners. These barrack differed from others because it included a washroom inside. It was also piped for toilets, but they were never utilized. These barracks were made from existing houses in the town which were torn down and used to build these particular barracks.

After a long and hard day, we made are way back to Krakow, in silence over what we learned as we felt drained both emotionally and physically.