Auschwitz I: Where it all Began
It is hard to imagine a place like Auschwitz-Birkenau if you have never actually been there. Reading about it, seeing pictures of the camps or watching TV programmes about it never seem to encapsulate what it is actually like. There is something about the place that is never captured by the media. On our trip to Auschwitz, for instance, we had some reporters and a photographer with us, but when I read the article that one of the reporters had written afterwards, it did nothing to show what it was really like. I hope that maybe I will be able to give you a feeling for what it was like and how it felt, personally, to go to a concentration camp. But also why it is still relevant today that we learn about what happened there.
After a very early start and a short flight from Luton airport we arrived in Krakow in Poland. It was quite ironic really; it was the most beautifully sunny day, although very cold with snow covering the ground. We boarded the coaches waiting for us at the airport and made our way through Poland to Oswiecim and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
First of all there were two main sections to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (or Birkenau). Auschwitz I was the original section of the camp and was established on the outskirts of the town Oswiecim in mid-1940. It was originally intended to be a concentration camp to hold the many Polish prisoners who had been arrested since the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, as the other prisons were beginning to over-flow. It was not until 1942 that the camp found another purpose. With the Final Solution decided upon at the Wannsee Conference, it became a place of mass murder. The camp was extended to include Auschwitz II (the Nazis did not build it themselves, they forced the prisoners to build it) which was where most of the killing would take place.
As you can see from the aerial photograph above the camp was made up of rows and rows of brick barracks. Before the Nazi invasion it was a Polish army barracks, which is why the buildings are in a lot better condition than many other concentration camps built by the Nazis.
One of the first things we saw upon arriving to the camp was the infamous entrance to the camp with the phrase: ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ wrought in iron above the entrance, imagine being a Polish political prisoner (the original inhabitants of Auschwitz) or a Jew and seeing that sign: ‘Work sets you free’. Everyday you would have to walk out through it to endure a day full of hard labour, and then in the evening walk back through again, more than likely carrying the ones who had died of exhaustion or starvation with you.
If you look to the far left and centre of the photograph above, you will see a little caption saying 'gas chamber', this was the first stop of the day for us after meeting up with our guide. It was one of the most shocking things I have ever seen in my whole life. Our guide led as around the outside of the barbed wire that surrounded the camp and straight to Crematorium I, the first gas chamber to be used at the camp. It was in operation from August 1940 until July 1943. The whole building is still intact today, unlike the larger crematoria in Auschwitz II which the Nazi’s blew up before they left, and our guide took us inside. The actual gas chamber was the size of medium-sized room, the ceiling was low and the lights on the walls gave off a dull glow. It might have been easy to put out of your mind what had actually occurred there, had it not been for the fact that on the walls there were still scratch marks left from where people in their last moments had clawed at them. Through into the room next to the gas chamber were the crematoria in which the Germans calculated that they could burn 340 corpses in 24hours in this crematorium alone.
Next we moved into the actual camp itself. In this aerial photograph taken by the allies in 1944 you can see the rows and rows of brick buildings. Each building housed from 700 to 1000 people; today they make up part of the Auschwitz museum. Inside they have large glass cases that contain what is left of the belongings of people who came to the camp. This includes suitcases, shoes and hair that was cut off by guards in the camp. You might wonder why such a large amount was left behind by the Nazi’s when they abandoned Auschwitz – this highly incriminating evidence of what had taken place there. Well, the answer is this: what you see here in these photographs is only a tiny amount of what the Nazi’s actually gathered together over the years. This was nothing. The shoes – piled high to the ceiling in this picture – a mere fraction of what they actually possessed. Before the Soviets liberated the camp in 1945 the Nazi’s had very little time to destroy all of the evidence, they didn’t care about the small amount that they left behind as it was nothing to what they actually did get round to destroying.
Some of the buildings were used for other purposes than housing the prisoners, Block 11, for instance, was know as the ‘death block’. It was the jail within the jail. It was in this block that prisoners suspected of belonging to the underground, planning escapes, were interrogated by the SS. In the basement were the jail cells, we were taken down inside, it was extremely cramped and claustrophobic in the corridors- God knows what it must have been like to have to stay in a cell over night. It was also in Block 11 that the Nazi’s first tested Zyklon-B gas as a means of mass extermination. In September 1941 600 Soviet POWs and 250 polish patients were taken from the camp ‘hospital’ and murdered.
It was after visiting Block 11 that we went to the block that contained an exhibition on Jewish oppression by the Nazi’s. After seeing this we proceeded to a room with a memorial in it for all the people who had died at the camp, it was covered in hundreds of candles, honouring the dead. It was here that Rabbi Marcus, who was travelling with us on the trip and helped to organise it, played us a prayer called ‘For Martyrs of the Holocaust.’ It was on that note that we left Auschwitz I and travelled to Birkenau or Auschwitz II where most of the killing took place.
Here are some of the pictures of Auschwitz I - these are pretty big files, so may take a minute or so to load.
'Arbeit Macht Frei' Gates into Auschwitz I
The Barracks of Auschwitz I
The Candle Memorial for the victims of Auschwitz