A small corner of Poland is forever etched on the conscience of the world as the scene of almost unimaginable horrors. In 1939, the town of Oswiencim was blessed with good rail connections, proximity to industry and the major Jewish communities of eastern Europe, and a Polish army barracks. These blessings were to be its undoing. Now it is infamous as its German name: Auschwitz. For this town became the site of the most horrifically efficient of all the Nazi death camps. At first a concentration camp for Poles deemed a threat – officers, teachers, scout leaders – it soon powered up to exterminate Slavs, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals, and, most notoriously, Jews. In all, roughly 1.5 million souls met their ends here.
A visit to Auschwitz is not recommended for the sensitive or easily upset. The museum does not pull its punches. The Jewish friend I was travelling with flatly refused to accompany me. Its horrors are laid thickly one over the other. Upon arrival, you watch a documentary showing footage of the camp and its liberation. As the Soviets closed in from the east, the Nazis abandoned the camp, driving those who were fit enough to walk before them in the March of Death. The weak, the infirm, and the sick were left behind, walking skeletons on the verge of death whose emaciated frames greeted their liberators. From there you enter the old Polish army barracks that formed the original nucleus of the camp, pleasant red-brick buildings interspersed with trees – if it were not for the barbed wire and the watchtowers and the signs reading “Halt! Stoj!” you might forget where you were. You pass beneath the wrought iron gate with its dark motto ‘Arbeit macht frei’ – ‘works makes you free.’ For the central conceit was that this was a work camp – those who worked well would be freed. Instead, strong workers would only have their liquidation postponed while their wives, parents, and children perished.
The barrack buildings are now a museum, each room a new hammer blow. The maps detailing where the prisoners were shipped from – Krakow, Hungary, the Baltic States, and even as far away as France and the Netherlands. The numbers – 3,000 from here, 482 from here, 6,000 from here, each numeral a real person slaughtered for a mad ideology. The photos – at its inception, full accounts were kept of those sent here, members of any potential Polish resistance: photo, name, occupation. Over and again the same phrase reappears: nauczyciel, nauczyciel, nauczyciel – teacher, teacher, teacher. The Germans were here to stay, and they wanted to eliminate every trace of an independent Polish culture. Then the exhibits. Case after case crammed with shoes, spectacles, dolls, and human hair. Sacks and sacks of human hair, shaved from the prisoners, to stuff pillows and cushions to aid in the war effort. I had seen many of the exhibits before at London’s Imperial War Museum, but that room of hair was nauseating.
My criticism would be that the museum is busy, full of people. You never get the chance to read all the boards or take in what you are seeing as your guide hurries through. The exhibits are shocking, but you merely feel that you are in a museum with no psychic residue of the atrocities committed here.
That is not the case at Birkenau. As the extermination programme stepped up, the needs of the Final Solution outgrew the original site. Another camp was constructed on the outskirts of town, a camp of wooden huts, the train line running into its rotten heart, beneath a brick arch to a siding where families would be torn asunder, the strong rerouted to work projects; women, the elderly, the infirm, and children sent off to the gas chambers disguised as shower blocks. Here the assistants of Dr Josef Mengele would select children, particularly twins, to vanish into his labs to be the subject of eugenic experiments. Now the huts are gone, except for a few reconstructions, and the gas chambers and crematoria demolished by the retreating Germans, hidden beneath a screen of trees. Yet, the archway and siding are instantly recognisable from any number of films, from Schindler’s List to X-Men. And here you feel alone, the vast scale of the site shocking you, the cold breeze chilling, the trees silent. The absence of bird song oppresses. Here you can feel the evil.
At the treeline there is a row of plaques. Written in all the languages of those who perished here, plus English, they read “For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children, mainly Jews from various countries of Europe. Auschwitz-Birkenau 1940-1945.”