My trip to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp
While I was in Poland a few months ago I was able to go to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Here’s some pictures I took while I was there and what I wrote to some of my friends and family the day of my visit.
In the afternoon I went to/on a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp, which was the largest of the Nazi death camps. This is what I wrote on in my notebook in between camps (Auschwitz was actually made up of three main camps and many sub-camps, our tour visited two of them) and on my way back after the second camp:
I just saw where thousands of Poles, Jews, Gypsies and others spent their last horrifying days. I saw two tons of women’s hair, most shaved from the bodies of the dead. I touched the thick wooden doors which held people in “starvation cells” and looked through the eye hole into the “dark cell,” also called the “suffocation cell” because it was so enclosed that not enough air could get in for the up to 40 people crammed in that too small space. I touched the same walls in the gas chambers which people clawed as they were poisoned, when they had been expecting a shower from the false shower heads on the ceiling above them. And I saw the very ovens which roasted so much human flesh into ashes.
Nothing was wasted, the hair sheared from human heads was sent to Germany and made into cloth for suits of clothing. Gold teeth were melted down into bars. Human ashes were used to fertilize the ground. And those few not immediately gassed were worked to death.
At another camp I just saw the gates through which more than a million people passed to meet their death, saw where they lived and sometimes froze to death, and looked at the crude few “toilets” thousands were forced to share and were only allowed to use for a few minutes, twice a day.
I think it was good for me to see these things, some horrible things are better not forgot so we will not allow them to happen again (though I know similar things are happening right now, just on a smaller scale).
At times I wished I had a “special someone” to have on my arm to see these things with me and other times I wished I could have been completely alone so I could have sat down and wept. As I touched the things which were original, that I could touch, I whispered in my mind over and over again to God, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
That’s all I wrote while I was there at the camps. At the first camp we weren’t supposed to take pictures inside because it is treated as a cemetery and so would be disrespectful to the dead, the second camp is treated the same way but we were allowed to take pictures…I don’t know why.
Here’s the pictures I took while I was there. See them and remember, remember our darkness and that there is also light and that it triumphs over all…while I was at those camps I couldn’t get over how peaceful they seemed, the prevailing feeling was, I guess, a peaceful sadness.
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