August 12, 2013

August 12, 2013

This morning we walked to the main Krakow bus station hidden behind the train station.  There we caught a bus that took us the forty miles to the town of Oswiecim.  The road goes through pretty rolling Polish countryside, but since there is no highway, the trip takes two hours.

A lot of Polish towns also have German names because large parts of present day Poland were German territory.  Oswiecim is better known by its infamous German name of Auschwitz.  We arrive to a madhouse.  I tell Aimee that there must be considerably more tourists now than my last tour of Europe thirty years ago.

Auschwitz entry is free, but after 10 am, all entrants must be escorted by a guide.  It is just as well. With this crowd, it would have been impossible to navigate the buildings solo.  Even by Polish standards the guided tour is not expensive, and I have to say our docent was very good and added a lot of emotion.  So much so, that I thought she was going to burst out crying several times.

Auschwitz was originally a Polish army barracks that was commandeered by the Nazis for a concentration camp to house Polish prisoners who resisted the German occupation.  Since prisoners were used as slave labor on subsistence diet, most did not survive long.  If you ignore the barbed wire fences surrounding it, Auschwitz looks like a nice little community of brick buildings with lots of trees. Unfortunately inside the barracks, prisoners were packed in like sardines.

Several of the Auschwitz buildings have displays about its concentration camp history.  Our guide adds a stirring account.  Auschwitz became really infamous when it was used to exterminate European Jews.  Our guide tells us about the process of transfer, stripping of valuables, gas chamber death, and removal of evidence through cremation.  The most stirring exhibits by far are the ones that show the items found in the warehouses.  Huge piles of eyeglasses, luggage, prosthetics, and shoes, especially kids shoes.  Every fifth person killed in Auschwitz was a child.

Across town is Auschwitz II, better known as Birkenau.  It was where most of the real action took place. We took a shuttle bus over to it for the second half of the tour.  Here most of the barracks were wooden structures.  Birkenau is enormous; the remains of barrack chimneys extend as far as you can see.  It was built as an industrial scale death camp.  A single rail line in, smoke and ash out the other end.  My feet hurt after walking one length and back.  Most of Birkenau has been obliterated.  The crematoriums were dynamited when the Nazis retreated.  A pile of rubble (and memories) are all that remains of them.

The level of human suffering and cruelty that took place here is so severe that it is mind numbing and unbelievable.  No wonder reports of the atrocities that leaked out were seen as propaganda even by Jews.