Krakow to Oswecim May 22-23

By Eric

Late in May, Polish nights are still cold. Actually this was great because we had started buying cold cereal and UHT milk for breakfast. When it got cold at night our milk was cold in the morning. But during the day it got fairly warm and we had lots of good weather.

The 60 km ride directly west to the town of Oswiecim was pretty painless. We learned once and for all that Polish food isn't too great in the small towns. It's best when it imitates other nationalities. We ate a lot of pizza in Poland. They did have lots of nice little restaurants along the highways -- very clean and modern and the beer is cheap.

The town of Oswiecim in Poland is called "Auschwitz" in German. The concentration camps (there were three near Oswiecim: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II - Birkenau and Auschwitz III) are located on the outskirts of the town.

I had some hesitations about visiting them. It was unlike any other place we had been to. As burned out as we were on all the great treasures of Krakow, I was afraid I wouldn't have the right respect for the horrors of Auschwitz. Something just felt wrong about being a burned out tourist at a place like that.

On the other hand, seeing is believing and the more people that see Auschwitz, the better. We decided to go.

We arrived in town around five p.m. and decided to head straight for Auschwitz 1 even before finding a place to stay. This was a good idea. The tour buses had all gone for the day and though they close the gates at six p.m. they do not make you leave. So our tour was not interrupted by gaggles of school children wearing walkmans and joking around nor by loads of tourists (we saw those folks the next day, at Birkenau). Only about 10 other people were walking around the grounds.

We walked in under the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work brings freedom) gate. Auschwitz 1 was smaller than I expected and the buildings were much more solid. They were made of bricks and mostly two stories high and laid out in a rigid grid. They had originally been barracks for the pre-war Polish army. These days we saw grass growing between the buildings and tall trees here and there. It could have been described as a grim sort of campus.

In 1942 they held an unimaginable 20,000 prisoners. Each person got far less space than a farmer provides a pig.

Several countries have displays inside the various buildings with photos and artwork. One, called Konigsgraben, showed Nazis supervising as the dying prisoners built a canal (Kongisgraben means King's Canal). These were not nearly as telling and sickening as the simple displays of what the Russian army found when it liberated the camp: Seven tons of human hair; thousands of suitcases carefully labeled with the owners name and address; a room full of brushes; a room full of shoes; a tangled cubic yard of spectacles. They found these even though the Germans spent three months destroying evidence including burning down 30 warehouses full of the personal items of the prisoners. There was also a display of bales of cloth made from human hair.

We also saw the wall of death. In addition to gassing the prisoners to kill them, the SS simply stood many of them in front off the wall of death and shot them. They shot so many that they had to build an especially thick wall for the purpose. This was next to a special barrack at the corner of the camp. The barrack contained torture chambers in the basement and a room for a "court" to meet and decide the fate of prisoners. This kind of barrack is probably typical of any totalitarian government.

Last we saw the gas chamber and crematorium. When they built this place as a mortuary and crematorium, they were killing the prisoners by shooting, starvation, disease and overwork. This apparently was not efficient enough for the Nazis so they developed the gas Cyclon B, testing it first on Russian POWS and sick inmates from the camp. Then they converted the mortuary into a gas chamber.

It is set underground and inside it looks like a concrete walled, dimly lit cellar. It had been partially destroyed by the Nazis. The crematorium contained two ovens that each burned three bodies at a time and 350 bodies per day.

The ovens, such a symbol of the holocaust, did not affect me as much as I expected. Even now there are crematoriums. And even though I had a lump in my throat walking into the gas chamber, nothing was as powerful to me as the piles and piles of hair and shoes and glasses and suitcases. Especially the suitcases. The handwriting on every one was unique.

We left Auschwitz 1 that night still with questions. Not much of the text inside was in English. Our main question was why did the Nazis bother keeping some prisoners alive? About three out of four were taken from the train and immediately killed in the gas chambers. But why go through all the trouble to keep prisoners around? Why keep 1 in 4? Our question was answered, more or less, the next day.

After camping the night at a place called the "German Youth for Peace Center" or something like (Joan: I know the war is over and most Germans are horrified by their history, but I have to say, it gave me the creeps, being in super shiny institutional showers at the campground. I couldn't stop thinking of the gas chambers) that we went to Auschwitz 2 - Birkenau early the next morning, around 8 a.m. This also turned out to be a good plan. The tour buses and children had not yet arrived.

It turns out that Auschwitz 1 was just a model camp. There they experimented and developed the system of mass murder. Auschwitz 2 - Birkenau was a huge scale implementation of what they learned at Auschwitz 1. Most of the famous photos, except the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, are taken here.

Birkenau is enormous. Most of it was burned down by the Nazis but many buildings and lots and lots of chimneys remain. As many as 100,000 prisoners lived here at one time.

A railroad track enters directly into the camp and divides into three parallel tracks. Simultaneously they could and did unloaded two train loads of boxcars packed full of people. Almost three out of four were sent to immediate execution in the gas chambers. The rest were sent to the camp where they were worked as slave labor until they died.

This is why they didn't just send them all to the gas chambers immediately. Oswiecim is in the middle of an amazingly dense industrial region. There are tall industrial chimneys sticking up everywhere. The inmates were used as slave labor in these plants until they died. Since the Nazis were killing most of them, their value was extremely low even for slaves. That is to say, even in the days of slavery in America the slaves had some value to the owners. If the owners killed the slaves or had such miserable conditions that the slaves got sick and couldn't work or died, the owner was out something. The slaves at Auschwitz on the other hand, did not even have this much value.

I'm sure the Nazis had determined exactly how little to feed an inmate to get the most work for the least money. It was always only a matter of time until the inmate died.

The crematorium and gas chambers at Birkenau were much more thoroughly dynamited by the Nazis than those at Auschwitz 1 but to me they were much scarier because they are huge and purpose-built. Someone must have calculated the number of people to be killed and determined a number of crematoriums, size of the gas chambers, number of length of the rail sidings, etc. Engineers and draftsmen drew these things up and had them built. Many, many people had to have been involved.

And the number of crematoriums! At Auschwitz 1 there were only two. Here at Birkenau they had built dozens. And Nazis did not build excess capacity. Additional gas chambers and crematoriums were planned but never built.

Though the gas chambers had been dynamited, we could still walk part way down the stairs that led to them. We retraced the exact steps of many victims.

As we were leaving we passed a gaggle of school kids, some listening to walkmans, ambling down the tracks like they were on their way to just another day of school.

This seemed a little disrespectful at first. But I decided it was not. They were just being kids. The important thing is that they came at all. It was very important to the inmates, and ultimately the world, that word of what was happening got out. It remains important. My hesitations about visiting were unfounded.

Next: Poland Chapter 4 - The Industrial Heart of Poland

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