Auschwitz and Birkenau
Monday, April 20, 2009
A few months ago I visited Krakow, Poland and the Concentration Camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau. I had arrived in Krakow the night before, and I would be leaving Poland the next evening. This was my day trip;
The sun rose and I felt fucking weird. Just outer-earthly. I haven't really talked to anyone about it since the few days after. But yeah, really odd. dreamlike. but not nightmarish, yeah? I sat on the train and stared into the polish woodlands. My sister had told me that when she was on the train all she could do was imagine jews running for their lives sixty years earlier. I couldn't. I just stared at the trees and the crumbling brick houses and their graffitied swastikas and felt numb. I tried to listen to my iPod, but stopped for because I didn't want to mix my memory and the music up into each other.
I got off the train and started walking. Two chinese-american guys were walking in front of me, and we all recognised each other from Warsaw a few days earlier. They asked directions from a local, who after a funny look or seven pointed them in the right direction, I followed at a distance, wanting to be alone with my thoughts.
Along the walk, a group of five Polish boys, aged 15-ish approach on the opposite side of the street. One of them points at the guys in front of me and shouts out,
"GOOK".
And they all start shouting, "GOOK, GOOK!" as they walk past.
We were less than 500m from the front gates of Auschwitz.
Auschwitz was originally a barracks for the polish army. The Germans took it over pretty early in the war, and started by keeping polish political prisoners there. Then they needed workers and the like, so they brought in Jews. They also used it as a testing facility, where the first Zyklon-B gas pellets were tested. It's actually pretty small, maybe 2 acres, and quite densely packed. Nowhere to run, that's for sure.
I walked under the gate that says (in German) "Work shall set you free." and shuddered. This place was, creepy, haunted, placid, out of time, mindnumbing, frozen and sickly.
I went to see one of the 'barracks' buildings where prisoners were kept. A gentle start to the day, really. There were photos of everything, of course, including how the prisoners slept. Like this >>>>>>>>>>>> and then another row of <<<<<<<<<<<, about eighty people in a row in a thirty metre long room. Four rows deep. Like this; <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
The sun rose and I felt fucking weird. Just outer-earthly. I haven't really talked to anyone about it since the few days after. But yeah, really odd. dreamlike. but not nightmarish, yeah? I sat on the train and stared into the polish woodlands. My sister had told me that when she was on the train all she could do was imagine jews running for their lives sixty years earlier. I couldn't. I just stared at the trees and the crumbling brick houses and their graffitied swastikas and felt numb. I tried to listen to my iPod, but stopped for because I didn't want to mix my memory and the music up into each other.
I got off the train and started walking. Two chinese-american guys were walking in front of me, and we all recognised each other from Warsaw a few days earlier. They asked directions from a local, who after a funny look or seven pointed them in the right direction, I followed at a distance, wanting to be alone with my thoughts.
Along the walk, a group of five Polish boys, aged 15-ish approach on the opposite side of the street. One of them points at the guys in front of me and shouts out,
"GOOK".
And they all start shouting, "GOOK, GOOK!" as they walk past.
We were less than 500m from the front gates of Auschwitz.
Auschwitz was originally a barracks for the polish army. The Germans took it over pretty early in the war, and started by keeping polish political prisoners there. Then they needed workers and the like, so they brought in Jews. They also used it as a testing facility, where the first Zyklon-B gas pellets were tested. It's actually pretty small, maybe 2 acres, and quite densely packed. Nowhere to run, that's for sure.
I walked under the gate that says (in German) "Work shall set you free." and shuddered. This place was, creepy, haunted, placid, out of time, mindnumbing, frozen and sickly.
I went to see one of the 'barracks' buildings where prisoners were kept. A gentle start to the day, really. There were photos of everything, of course, including how the prisoners slept. Like this >>>>>>>>>>>> and then another row of <<<<<<<<<<<, about eighty people in a row in a thirty metre long room. Four rows deep. Like this; <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
and so on. There were 8 rooms per building and 24 buildings. Numbers hurt my brain.
I went outside in a daze. There were tour groups in gruff german and rolling french at every corner. The people were getting to me. So I went to the Gas Chamber. It was situated about 10m through the fences out one side of the complex. I took a breath and felt sick. The chamber was a converted bunker, with a chimney out the top. It had the only green-lawn grass I'd seen in Poland as a roof. I went inside.
It was the most fearful place I have ever been inside.
Low ceiling, just like a cellar. Dark, cold and empty, save for a wreath and a candle. I stood and cried and cried and cried. I put a stone on the floor just past the hand railing, next to all the others. I went outside.
I pushed through a group of Polish schoolkids, laughing, kicking stones to each other with tears in my eyes. Through the double fences of barbed wire, back into the heart of the camp. I found a deserted part of the camp, visible only by a guard tower, and sat and cried some more. Sorrowful, deep, hurting sobs.
When I stopped, I went to see the rest of Auschwitz. In some of the buildings were examples of torture. Fucked up to the max, the kind of sick stories that kid tell other kids to freak them out. Except there were photos. Photos of the tortures, photos of the apparatus.
And photos of the dead. Every person interned in Auschwitz in the first 3 years of the camp was photographed and their details recorded. My grandfather was there from the 4th-6th years before liberation, so no photo.
The photos are what I remember most. Thousands upon thousands of men (and some women), shaved heads, no glasses, prison stripes. Old men, young men. Wasted faces, gaunt cheekbones and hollow eyes. Some look at the camera confused, others without emotion. Most have no hope and show only fear in their eyes. With perfect, rifle induced posture. I bet the Nazis got a real kick out of those. But one in fifty or so had a look about them, a hope, a strength. Not the manic 'I'll have the last laugh' look, but a firm, stoic, confident look.
They all died. Every single photograph. Dead.
I visited the death wall where they executed people. I saw the 'standing cells' that you had to crawl into through a grill a foot high and was about the size of a pillow, and the opposite level of soft, warm and comfortable. I saw the gallows where a dozen at a go would be hanged in tandem. I saw the 'roll call' area, where every inmate would stand for as long as the commandant required, without moving. Up to thirteen hours.
I read about the Sonderkommando. They were the men charged with travelling to Birkenau and cleaning out the chambers after each gassing and disposing of the bodies. Every six months, all hundred of them would be shot and another hundred trained. This was to destroy the evidence.
It was noon. I was numb. So I took a stone from the yard and left. I held the stone all day. I went and sat outside for a bit, to try and clear my head. Fat freaking chance. I started walking towards Birkenau, about three miles. It was pretty routine for inmates to be sent on the same march, and those lagging to be shot. I took my sweet time, because hey, screw them.
I had also decided to forgo food on this day. Call it symbolic, call it sheer silliness, I wasn't going to be chowing down a chocolate bar in a concentration camp, y'know.
Birkenau is the one in Schindler's List. The one with the 'Gate of Death' and the railway line and the watch tower. I walked straight up the railway line. Through the gate of death. Past the wreaths.
Birkenau is huge. Just massive. Over a kilometre from front the Gate of Death at the front to the forest at back, and nearly a mile wide. And it's all fenced, like deer paddocks. There are single story huts that slept about 600 people, about ten to a box. A box being the size of a king single, made of wood with maybe some hay if you're lucky. Three boxes high. The latrines are as in Schindler's List. You know, when the children hide in the faeces and urine to avoid death.
I strolled around; firstly up to the back of the camp where the shells of the main gas chambers are. The Nazis dynamited them when they were going to lose, to hide the evidence. So, unlike Auschwitz, there's no actual chamber or floor plan, just a brick pit where the 'showers' happened. There's also the Holocaust Memorial in about fifty languages. I felt ashamed that I couldn't read the Hebrew. I walked back down the railway of death and walked down a side road, used to move victims to chambers 3,4 and 5 on the far side of the camp. The road goes right down the middle of the camp, like this.
chambers 1 and 2 at rear of camp. 0000000|| chambers 3,4,&5
][ <-- railway line 000000 Huts 0000000 || ][ 000000 Huts 0000000000000000000|| ][============================|| <-- road ][ ][ gate of death down here.
The sun was setting, and everything was martian red. The temperature plummeted, and I stared at the path. There was dirt and rocks. All red. Like another planet. Like blood. There were long shadows fencing the in and the out. I wasn't in but I as going somewhere worse. I walked along the road. I remembered one of the songs I'd listened to on the train. The song is unsettling anyway; Frou Frou's Psychobabble.
That alien landscape is still burned into my brain. The sick-at-heart feeling, creeping, scrawling at my back.
At the end of the road I turned left and walked towards chambers 3,4 & 5. Behind them is the 'washing' room, where the prisoners were deloused, shaven, robbed of all their possessions, drenched and 'selected' for work or for imprisonment. These were luckier people than most.
Before it reaches the chambers (and ovens), the road passes through two clumps of trees, each about the size of two basketball courts. The sign says... "On some days, the gas chambers were so busy that Jews awaiting death were made to wait in these trees." And there's a photo of maybe a hundred people, all dressed in stock-standard 1930's clothing in the trees. All the women look terrified and empty. All the children are frozen and the men, empty.
This clump of trees occupies my nightmares. I think, deep down, it always has, but now I know what it looks like. The red walk to the trees and the ovens.
I took some time to look at the surrounding chambers and to quietly ponder the sights of the mass, open air graves. I laid a stone on the memorial plaques. That's a Jewish thing to do. It shows you've been and that you remember. I walked past the selection room and the site of the storage room for glasses and shoes and clothing.
It was getting dark. I had a torch, but, let's face it, we both know that getting stuck in a concentration camp after dark, where no one in the world can contact me is pretty much the scariest thing I can think of. So, I made my way back to the memorial, where there was some light, and walked back up the railway line.
Just before I walked back out through the gates of death, I turned and surveyed the barren, desolate fields of death to which I hope I never return. I walked back along the railway lines to the city of Osweincim and waited for my train. I ate a roll.
I caught the train back to Krakow. Just before midnight, I caught a train from Krakow to Venice.
To another world.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
and so on. There were 8 rooms per building and 24 buildings. Numbers hurt my brain.
I went outside in a daze. There were tour groups in gruff german and rolling french at every corner. The people were getting to me. So I went to the Gas Chamber. It was situated about 10m through the fences out one side of the complex. I took a breath and felt sick. The chamber was a converted bunker, with a chimney out the top. It had the only green-lawn grass I'd seen in Poland as a roof. I went inside.
It was the most fearful place I have ever been inside.
Low ceiling, just like a cellar. Dark, cold and empty, save for a wreath and a candle. I stood and cried and cried and cried. I put a stone on the floor just past the hand railing, next to all the others. I went outside.
I pushed through a group of Polish schoolkids, laughing, kicking stones to each other with tears in my eyes. Through the double fences of barbed wire, back into the heart of the camp. I found a deserted part of the camp, visible only by a guard tower, and sat and cried some more. Sorrowful, deep, hurting sobs.
When I stopped, I went to see the rest of Auschwitz. In some of the buildings were examples of torture. Fucked up to the max, the kind of sick stories that kid tell other kids to freak them out. Except there were photos. Photos of the tortures, photos of the apparatus.
And photos of the dead. Every person interned in Auschwitz in the first 3 years of the camp was photographed and their details recorded. My grandfather was there from the 4th-6th years before liberation, so no photo.
The photos are what I remember most. Thousands upon thousands of men (and some women), shaved heads, no glasses, prison stripes. Old men, young men. Wasted faces, gaunt cheekbones and hollow eyes. Some look at the camera confused, others without emotion. Most have no hope and show only fear in their eyes. With perfect, rifle induced posture. I bet the Nazis got a real kick out of those. But one in fifty or so had a look about them, a hope, a strength. Not the manic 'I'll have the last laugh' look, but a firm, stoic, confident look.
They all died. Every single photograph. Dead.
I visited the death wall where they executed people. I saw the 'standing cells' that you had to crawl into through a grill a foot high and was about the size of a pillow, and the opposite level of soft, warm and comfortable. I saw the gallows where a dozen at a go would be hanged in tandem. I saw the 'roll call' area, where every inmate would stand for as long as the commandant required, without moving. Up to thirteen hours.
I read about the Sonderkommando. They were the men charged with travelling to Birkenau and cleaning out the chambers after each gassing and disposing of the bodies. Every six months, all hundred of them would be shot and another hundred trained. This was to destroy the evidence.
It was noon. I was numb. So I took a stone from the yard and left. I held the stone all day. I went and sat outside for a bit, to try and clear my head. Fat freaking chance. I started walking towards Birkenau, about three miles. It was pretty routine for inmates to be sent on the same march, and those lagging to be shot. I took my sweet time, because hey, screw them.
I had also decided to forgo food on this day. Call it symbolic, call it sheer silliness, I wasn't going to be chowing down a chocolate bar in a concentration camp, y'know.
Birkenau is the one in Schindler's List. The one with the 'Gate of Death' and the railway line and the watch tower. I walked straight up the railway line. Through the gate of death. Past the wreaths.
Birkenau is huge. Just massive. Over a kilometre from front the Gate of Death at the front to the forest at back, and nearly a mile wide. And it's all fenced, like deer paddocks. There are single story huts that slept about 600 people, about ten to a box. A box being the size of a king single, made of wood with maybe some hay if you're lucky. Three boxes high. The latrines are as in Schindler's List. You know, when the children hide in the faeces and urine to avoid death.
I strolled around; firstly up to the back of the camp where the shells of the main gas chambers are. The Nazis dynamited them when they were going to lose, to hide the evidence. So, unlike Auschwitz, there's no actual chamber or floor plan, just a brick pit where the 'showers' happened. There's also the Holocaust Memorial in about fifty languages. I felt ashamed that I couldn't read the Hebrew. I walked back down the railway of death and walked down a side road, used to move victims to chambers 3,4 and 5 on the far side of the camp. The road goes right down the middle of the camp, like this.
chambers 1 and 2 at rear of camp. 0000000|| chambers 3,4,&5
][ <-- railway line 000000 Huts 0000000 || ][ 000000 Huts 0000000000000000000|| ][===========================
The sun was setting, and everything was martian red. The temperature plummeted, and I stared at the path. There was dirt and rocks. All red. Like another planet. Like blood. There were long shadows fencing the in and the out. I wasn't in but I as going somewhere worse. I walked along the road. I remembered one of the songs I'd listened to on the train. The song is unsettling anyway; Frou Frou's Psychobabble.
That alien landscape is still burned into my brain. The sick-at-heart feeling, creeping, scrawling at my back.
At the end of the road I turned left and walked towards chambers 3,4 & 5. Behind them is the 'washing' room, where the prisoners were deloused, shaven, robbed of all their possessions, drenched and 'selected' for work or for imprisonment. These were luckier people than most.
Before it reaches the chambers (and ovens), the road passes through two clumps of trees, each about the size of two basketball courts. The sign says... "On some days, the gas chambers were so busy that Jews awaiting death were made to wait in these trees." And there's a photo of maybe a hundred people, all dressed in stock-standard 1930's clothing in the trees. All the women look terrified and empty. All the children are frozen and the men, empty.
This clump of trees occupies my nightmares. I think, deep down, it always has, but now I know what it looks like. The red walk to the trees and the ovens.
I took some time to look at the surrounding chambers and to quietly ponder the sights of the mass, open air graves. I laid a stone on the memorial plaques. That's a Jewish thing to do. It shows you've been and that you remember. I walked past the selection room and the site of the storage room for glasses and shoes and clothing.
It was getting dark. I had a torch, but, let's face it, we both know that getting stuck in a concentration camp after dark, where no one in the world can contact me is pretty much the scariest thing I can think of. So, I made my way back to the memorial, where there was some light, and walked back up the railway line.
Just before I walked back out through the gates of death, I turned and surveyed the barren, desolate fields of death to which I hope I never return. I walked back along the railway lines to the city of Osweincim and waited for my train. I ate a roll.
I caught the train back to Krakow. Just before midnight, I caught a train from Krakow to Venice.
To another world.
Thanks for sharing this. It was very moving.
Definitely. They say that birds won't fly over those places. And every time it happens, as a race we swear "never again".
What human beings choose to
inflict on other human beings
is completely incomprehensible.
I cannot begin to convey
the sadness I feel reading
this.(Or the array of other emotions; shock, fear, horror, anger at the senselessness, helplessness and
powerlessness of it all .....)
Thankyou for sharing it, I
know it must have been
difficult for you, especially
since you had family there.
I can't stop the tears
falling it's just so sad.