Note: I took notes on our tour of Aushwitz and sometimes it was difficult to write down all the facts completely. Therefore, what follows may have some discrepancies in it. However, I'm sure the severity of the atrocities will be very clear even if they're not exactly factually correct.
April 23, 2011: Our tour bus left the hotel around 9:00. The bus drive from Krakow to Aushwitz took over an hour. On the bus, we watched a video of the history of the Aushwitz concentration camps which consist of three main areas: Aushwitz, Berkenau, and Monowitz, plus 40 other subcamps. The first camp we visited was Aushwitz, the first of the camps used in 1940 to house Jews and other victims of the Nazis including Poles, political dissidents, and gypsies. Aushwitz was selected because it was a compound that already had buildings on it that could be used immediately for holding Nazi prisoners. Berkenau was later constructed to house the victims when Aushwitz became too full, and Monowitz served as a labor camp. (I will refer to all three camps as "Aushwitz" for this blog entry.) In order to get to Aushwitz, all prisoners were required to pay for a train ticket and prisoners were transported to Aushwitz 80 people per railroad car (no windows).
Upon arrival, the prisoners were met by a band that played music to "soothe" them as they were registered. Of the prisoners who entered Aushwitz, most Jewish prisoners (primarily those unfit for work such as women, children, or the elderly) were immediately executed before they could be registered so the actual count of those executed at Aushwitz is not exact because the tally of the unregistered prisoners is not known. Furthermore, upon liberation, the Nazis destroyed 86% of the documentation of those registered in the camps making it even more difficult to determine exactly how many people were murdered, but the current estimate is that around 1,100,000 to 1,500,000 prisoners were murdered. Of the Jews who were murdered, the largest group came from Hungary (430,000). Other large groups that were executed were the Poles, gypsies, political dissidents, and homosexuals. Over all, three million Poles were executed during the war both at Aushwitz and other locations, accounting for 20% of the Polish population. Of the prisoners who entered Aushwitz, only 20% of them were deemed fit for work while the other 80% were immediately sent to be executed. This was decided as they entered the camp where "doctors" would arbitrarily decide with the point of a finger who would go to the work line and who would go to be executed. Prisoners were issued six pointed stars to wear. The color(s) of these stars indicated what kind of prisoner they were -- yellow for Jew, red for political dissident, pink for homosexual, green for gypsy, etc. All prisoners were also tattooed with a number on their left forearm and after that they were referred to by this number and not their name.
Upon arrival, the possessions of the prisoners were taken from them, many of them believing that their property would be returned to them when they left the "work camp". After they left their property, the Nazis would dispose of the possessions, putting shoes in one pile (over 80,000 pairs of shoes were found after the war ended), combs, eye glasses, suitcases, etc. In exchange for a prisoner's shoes, he/she was given a pair of shoes each one made of a single piece of wood.
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| Eye glasses confiscated at Aushwitz |
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| Artificial limbs confiscated at Aushwitz |
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| Over 80,000 pairs of shoes were confiscated at Aushwitz |
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| Hair brushes confiscated at Aushwitz |
As we entered the compound, we passed through a gate over which was written "Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Brings Freedom)".
To prevent escape, a number of precautions were put in place. Two parallel fences of electrified barbed wire were placed around the compound making it difficult for anyone to try to climb over the fence. (Some prisoners who feared the worst, used these electrified fences to commit suicide rather than live through the ordeal they were about to face.) Also, if anyone did successfully escape during a work shift outside the compound, twelve prisoners from his work group would be executed when roll was taken at the end of the day. The Nazis conducted roll daily and prisoners were forced to stand at attention during roll call until every prisoner was accounted for. Sometimes, roll call took place from night until the next morning and prisoners were forced to stand in fields barefoot even during the winter while this was done.
Berkenau was built to house the overflow of prisoners of the war. It consisted of 320 barracks, each barrack housing 600 prisoners: B1 was for women prisoners, B2A for the prisoners who had newly arrived, B2B for Jewish families, (These barracks were created for propaganda purposes to show the West that the prisoners were humanely treated; pictures were taken of "happy, content" Jewish families and sent to the West.), B2E for gypsies, and B2F as a "hospital" where Dr. Mengele and others performed human experimentation on women, twins, and others who would be killed so that he could perform autopsies on his experiments. B2G was the area where all the property of the prisoners was confiscated.
In 1942, the concentration camps were updated to enable more executions to take place. This was done with the installation of five gas chambers, one at Aushwitz and four at Berkenau. Crematoriums were also constructed at each of the chambers. The gas used in the chambers was at first Cyclone B (hydrogen cyanide) and later carbon monoxide.
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| Cyclone B cannisters used for gassing |
Prior to 1942, all executions were conducted by shooting the victims. With the gas chambers, 600 people could be gassed per day per chamber but the crematoriums could only cremate 300 victims per day. Before cremation however, the dead bodies were "processed" by shaving their hair to be used to make stockings, and teeth extracted so that the gold fillings could be recycled. Many pounds of gold were salvaged in this way. Before going into the gas chambers, all prisoners were forced to strip their clothes outside. They were also issued a bar of soap being told that they were being given a shower. This was done to prevent panic should the prisoners find out that in actuality they were being sent to be gassed to death. The gassing process took around 30 minutes. Then the chamber would be aired and the bodies sent for further processing (i.e. removal of hair and teeth followed by cremation).
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| Aushwitz Gas Chamber chimney |
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| Entrance to gas chamber |
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| Memorial within gas chamber |
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| Crematorium within gas chamber |
Many of the prisoners were used as human experiments by doctors including Dr. Mengele. He performed experiments on women to explore his ideas on reproductive sterilization and on twins to see how different treatments worked on two humans of the same genetic makeup. Doctors also conducted experiments on humans by injecting them with typhus and leprosy. Most of these experiments resulted in painful deaths to the subjects being tested on. In addition, doctors castrated men to ensure they could no longer reproduce.
Torture consisted of many different techniques, each one worse than the one previously presented: There were starvation chambers, suffocation chambers, standing chambers (tiny rooms with no windows in which four prisoners were forced to stand for days on end), execution walls, hanging posts, posts where prisoners were forced to be hanged from their arms which were tied behind their backs, and flogging posts. Flogging was the most brutal of punishments -- prisoners would be flogged twenty times and the prisoner had to count in German how many times he had been flogged, and if he/she made a mistake in German, the flogging would start all over. Should a prisoner survive any of these tortures, he was immediately sent back to the labor camp to work until he collapsed in death. Hangings were done to be viewed by all the other prisoners. On one occasion, there were twelve simultaneous hangings.
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| Standing Chamber: four prisoners were forced to stand in this chamber in the dark for days on end |
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| Execution Wall |
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| Hanging post: prisoners were hung from this post by their arms tied behind their backs |
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| Hanging bar: up to 12 prisoners were hung on this bar at a time while the other prisoners watched |
As one can imagine, the living conditions of the barracks were beyond description. 600 prisoners lived in each barrack and up to six people slept on one bunk bed. Toilets were in a special barrack so that after they were locked in their barrack for the night, they had to rely on one bucket as a toilet in each barrack. This created a real problem for those with dysentery. Prisoners were give two meals per day: soup for lunch, and a dinner of bread and soup at night (Prisoners had to reserve some of their bread for breakfast the next morning). It has been calculated since then that a prisoner's food contained only 1200 calories per day. No wonder that when liberation occurred, women prisoners who survived weighed only 25 kg (~55 lb.)
Upon liberation, only 7,000 people had survived their ordeal in Aushwitz. In fact, the average time a prisoner remained alive after arriving in Aushwitz was only three months!
I asked our guide if Schindler's List was filmed at Aushwitz and she answered that the museum allows only documentary movies to be filmed on location. However, Spielberg did film Schindler's List just outside Berkenau using props that accurately replicated the real items within the compound and he used the real Berkenau as the background for many scenes.
Here are various pictures taken at Aushwitz.
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| Playing music upon entry to Aushwitz |
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| 450,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Aushwitz |
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| One bed slept five to six prisoners |
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| One bed slept five to six prisoners |
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| This woman stayed alive six months! |
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| This woman stayed alive six months! |
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| Berkenau |
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| Berkenau |
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| Berkenau |
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| Berkenau - note toilets |
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| Berkenau |
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| Berkenau |
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| Berkenau |
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| Berkenau |
As you can imagine, it was not very pleasant typing this entry into my blog. I hope that I will never have to recount such an awful event again. However, the experience of having visited Aushwitz will remain with me the rest of my life. May those who died in this tragedy rest in peace.
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