Chilling memories in the cold

Blower
Apr 21, 2018
5 min read

A chill wind made an already cold day, freezing. 7am in Krakow, Poland and we join a small group heading to Auschwitz - Birkenau. The journey takes an hour or so during which we watch a video in which one of the first Russian cameramen describes the film made as the camp was liberated over 70 years ago. The film finishes and the coach is silent as we all consider what we have just seen and what we are about to experience.

Auschwitz Concentration Camp

The merest mention of the name Auschwitz usually makes most people shudder. In fact the complex is made up of 3 distinct camps. Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I (the original concentration camp), Auschwitz II–Birkenau (a combination concentration/extermination camp), Auschwitz III–

Monowitz (a labour camp to staff an IG Farben factory), and 45 satellite camps.

Auschwitz I was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. The first extermination of prisoners took place in September 1941. Auschwitz II–Birkenau went on to become a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish Question during the Holocaust.

We travel first to Auschwitz II - Birkenau. The entrance to the camp

is very underplayed, closely surrounded by all the trappings of modern day life: neat semi detached houses, a large garage, small row of shops and so on. I wonder to myself what it must be like living so close to such a notorious site.

Originally stabling for military horses, the camp was quickly converted by the Nazi's into a concentration camp. Long rows of brick buildings all entirely anonymous as to their purpose. The camp is heavily fortified with barbed wire and high voltage electric fencing. Conditions were so poor that many prisoners chose to throw themselves on to the fencing and face certain electrocution than the painful death through starvation, exhaustion or worse.

Auschwitz I by comparison is on a much larger scale. Timber huts rapidly constructed cover a huge area, again encircled with fortifications and electric fencing. many of the huts have rotted away leaving just the foundations. Both camps have their sinister side: the gas chambers and crematoria used to murder so many innocent people. By September 1944 the Nazi's fled the camp in the face of approaching Allied troops. Before doing so, they attempted to hide the ghastly activities they had administered, by blowing up the crematoria. The Birkenau crematoria still survives as a very chilling reminder to their horrific purpose.

From early 1942 until late 1944, cramped and crowded transport trains delivered Jews to

the camp's gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe. Upon arrival, the occupants of each train (about 1500-2000 people) were split into two groups. The able bodied were transported into the camp to be used as forced labour in the nearby Farben munitions factory. The second group comprising mainly of women, children, the old and infirm were sent to the gas chambers for murder.

Prisoners were relieved of anything of value, suitcases, clothes, personal effects, spectacles, pots, pans, jewels, money. In fact anything that could be reused.

Suitcases and artificial limbs taken from prisoners on arrival at the camp

Upon liberation, the Allies discovered warehouses full and dedicated to these items awaiting repatriation back to Germany. It is chilling and moving to see these on display in the Camp museum.

Murder on a mass scale

Prisoners sent to forced labour faced a short life of misery, starvation, cold and

exhaustion. The daily routine was a march to the factory was followed by a 12 hour working day and at day end, a return march for roll call and a gruel made from rotten vegetables. A thin uniform with wooden 'flip flops' was all the protection each prisoner had against the elements. In winter the temperature dropped as low as minus 20 degrees C with plentiful snow. Life expectancy was less than 3 months.

The routine was designed to kill. And if this was not enough, then

prisoners were routinely tortured for the most minor infringement or no infringement at all. The "Cell" was a 3 foot square chimney, with

no windows, into which four prisoners were forced through a small gap in the base. Here they would be held for 3/4 days without food or water.

Prisoners deemed to be of no value - women, children, the old, infirm and anyone else, were murdered as soon as practically possible. The Nazi's gave the pretence that these prisoners were to be sent for a shower before being shown the way to "a new land of opportunity"

Up to 1500 prisoners at a time were herded into huge "shower" blocks, whereupon tablets of Zyklon B were dropped in, causing death by asphyxiation in around 20 minutes.

Used canisters of the pesticide "Zyklon B"

Forced labour was the used to load the bodies into adjacent furnaces. Before this took place, each body was shaved of hair and pliers used to remove gold dentures. The hair was used to make rugs and blankets and gold smelted into bullion. The ash was used to fertilise nearby farmland.

An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, of whom at least 1.1 million died. Around 90 percent of those were Jews; approximately one in six Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Romani and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 400 Jehovah's Witnesses, and tens of thousands of others of diverse nationalities, including an unknown number of homosexuals.Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labour, infectious diseases, individual executions and medical experiments.

The notorious Josef Mengle carried out horrific medical experiments at the camp: the prisoners were just lab rats.

What do we learn?

It is estimated that over 8000 Nazi's were responsible for the day to day running of the camp during its 5 years in operation. Of this number less than 1% were convicted of war crimes, many with comparatively short periods of imprisonment. In the febrile atmosphere of the post war period perhaps this is unsurprising.

The vast numbers that visit this place each year, many of whom are young gives hope that the horrors that took place there can never happen again. Yet they do. Post war history is littered with similar human atrocities if not on the same scale but with the same outcome. We can only hope that an increasingly globalised world can bring real pressure on the few that ignore the human rights of the many.