Where Is Joey Today?

Auschwitz Tour

This is the 3rd Concentration Camp I have visited (the others being Mauthausen and Dachau) but it was by far the worst, both in terms of its emotional impact and the nature of the camp. Like before, the feeling is undeniably haunting but contrary to the previous visits, the weather was appropriately raw; around 50F and raining. I think God was crying along with us.

There is a visitor's center that serves food (a noticeable difference between Mauthausen and Dachau), a gift shop (which at the onset gave me really mixed feelings. Fortunately it is tastefully done and they offer books, ponchos, batteries, disposable cameras and footage of the liberation), and a projection room that shows footage taken by the Russians on and after liberation day; January 27, 1945.

I have read a fair amount about the Holocaust (and Auschwitz in particular) so there may have been fewer surprises for me than there were for others. For starters, Auschwitz is often incorrectly used as the name for Birkenau and the entire camp complex. There were three camps. The original camp (Auschwitz), the extermination camp (Birkenau), and an industrial work plant that produced synthetic rubber (Monowice-Bunawerke). With the latter being destroyed, visitors can only tour Auschwitz and Birkenau.

A guide speaks into a microphone and we listen through headphones. As I walked through the infamous Arbeit Mach Frei (work brings freedom) sign in Auschwitz I felt a little confused. I believed that sign to have been seen by the millions of victims as they entered. The overwhelming majority never saw the cynical slogan. I felt oddly normal walking on the roads between the housing complexes.

It is easier to forget the atrocities when you are surrounded by 20 other people. But as time and the tour went on it drained everyone in the group. The camp was originally meant for Polish soldiers and then after the September 1st invasion it was used by the Nazis. The barrack tour starts with a little history and maps from Nazi occupied Europe. As it moves on it shows trains of mostly Jewish prisoners arriving. Disturbing photos of families aligned after selection; their death in the gas chambers a fait accompli, horrifically malnourished children, twin victims of Mengele's sadistic experiments along with glasses, suitcases, shoes and other personal artifacts. But it was the hair that was worst.

There is a room with filled with human hair. From ceiling to near floor, and 20 yards long. When you say a million people died, you can just as easily say 100,000, 10,000 or 10 million. Humans don't handle numbers that large very well and orders of magnitude are as easily lost as adding commas and zeros... but the hair both makes it intensely personal and gives you a sense of the scale. 14,000 lbs of hair were recovered from Auschwitz...and that was what was only what was left after it had been used for packing textile industries and the like for the entire course of the war.

Next was a prison within the prison for inmates who broke the rules (which ranged from working too slowly, to relieving yourself outside of the two designated times per day) and horrific punishments (hanging people by their arms, starvation chambers, suffocation rooms) that seem more fitting in a medieval museum than in a 20th century memorial.

The tour finishes the with a reconstruction of the Auschwitz gas chamber and crematory. Nazis sensing the Russians would be in Poland shortly thereafter destroyed as much of the evidence as possible. Some historians believe only 7% of the paperwork to have survived the this coverup. You can only wonder what they were thinking.

We finished the Auschwitz tour and boarded a bus for the roughly 2 mile journey to Birkenau. It was standing room only but there were no complaints. The group reconvened just beyond the infamous watchtower. From there we walked to the barracks to see models of how they lived. Prisoners who worked emptying the toilets had the most desirable jobs because they worked inside and because they smelled so badly, the kapos and other blockfuhrers didn't want to get close enough to beat them.

Finally we ended with the remains of the crematoria which haven't been moved much since WWII. Since we tend to think of trash as needing removal, seeing it as it was in 1945 closed the 63 year gap and made it feel uncomfortably recent.

By this time we were numb both emotionally from the day and physically from the cold, so we headed back. If you climb the watchtower you can see from one end of the camp to the other, something you can't do on the ground. I completely underestimated how large the camp was.

When I hear holocaust deniers coming up with Zionist conspiracies to explain the founding of Israel or at least minimizing numbers suggesting the scope of the crimes was vastly exaggerated, I am strongly sympathetic to the idea this atrocity could not possibly have happened.

How I wish they were right.

--Joey