Visiting Auschwitz

Auschwitz isn’t a nice place to visit and I’ll say that straight away. It is a horrible place haunted by its dark history, but is a place that a lot of people visit to pay their respects to the victims of the holocaust.  Auschwitz was the biggest concentration camp used by the Nazi’s during the holocaust and was the place where over 1 million Jews were murdered in one of the deadliest war crimes of all time.

Today, Auschwitz is a UNESCO World Heritage Site where millions of tourists come every year to pay their respects and learn more about the reality of life in Nazi Germany.

Our tour was arranged by Escape2Poland, who organised our transport, guide and entrance fees. On our way to Auschwitz, the driver put on a documentary about its history which nearly lasted the whole two hours from Krakow before we arrived. Upon arrival, we left our bags in the minibus – as the minimum baggage size is 30x20x10cm. Our driver ran inside and sorted our tickets out very quickly before leading us through the security and giving us all a set of headphones to use to listen to our tour guide.

The construction of Auschwitz began in 1940 in the abandoned polish army barracks. The Nazi’s forced the prisoners who were considered ‘fit to work’ to constantly expand the camp. They created a 40sq kilometre area around the camp as the ‘development zone’.

The tour began at the gate to Auschwitz, which is still the original gate from the 1940s. Each of the buildings had been remodelled into various exhibitions. The most notable one for me was block 5; Physical evidence of crime. The exhibition was the items seized from murdered prisoners in their mass quantities, the items include; baskets, suitcases, shoes, clothes and children’s garments. I found this the most moving exhibition as it showed the true scale of how many people were murdered.

In Block 4, photography is forbidden in order to be respectful. Part of the exhibition shows a pile of hair of 30,000 prisoners. After the prisoners were killed in the gas chambers, the Nazi’s would shave their heads and sell the hair to textile companies back in Germany. The other notable areas are the death wall and the gas chambers. It was very emotional stood in the gas chambers, imagining the haunting past that the room had and how many people were killed in there.

Many Nazi doctors conducted horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz. Josef Mengele was a Nazi doctor who had a disturbing fascination with twins and spent his entire time at Auschwitz studying them. He would test the effects of various drugs on them and kill them to compare their bodies. One of the most disturbing experiments was when he tried to sew two children together in an attempt to create Siamese twins. There isn’t any justification for these torturous experiments and many people speculate that he did it for his own pleasure.

The second part of the tour was a short drive away to Birkenau. Auschwitz-Birkenau was still part of the Auschwitz network but was located a few miles away. It was the place where the prisoners arrived by train and were separated from their families. The Birkenau camp was built in 1941 and had the largest prison population. The camp was divided into ten sections separated by electrified fences and were permanently patrolled by Nazi guards.

It is important to note that it wasn’t just Jews that were murdered. Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, non-Jewish poles, soviet prisoners of war and many other nationalities. Auschwitz-Birkenau had the highest death rate but also the highest survival rate of the Nazi concentration camps. The camps included sections for women, men, a family camp for Roma (Gypsies), and a family camp for Jews deported from the Theresienstadt ghetto.

The families were separated into men, and women & children. The men who were considered fit to work received tattoos and were put to work. The women and children didn’t receive tattoos and were sent directly to the gas chambers. Auschwitz was the only concentration camp that gave prisons the tattoos, which was the serial number assigned to them.

As our tour came to an end, we were still all in shock. Both Auschwitz and Birkenau are horrific places to visit but it is important that people see the reality of what life was like in Nazi Germany to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again…