October 23, 2017 Oswiecim/Auschwitz-Biekenau
We had pre-purchased round-trip train tickets for our trip
to Auschwitz (that is the German name for the medium sized industrial Polish
town near the camp). I had read that the bus trip was more efficient, but that
the train trip was more scenic and provided a more realistic view of Poland. It
was a short walk to the train station, Krakow Gtowny which was well laid out
and easy to navigate. We quickly found our platform and were early, so we
waited a while on the platform. The train was quite old fashioned. The rest
room was an enclosure with a hole emptying onto the track. The countryside that
we traveled through appeared to be decidedly less prosperous that the Krakow
area. Very old looking tractors, few motorized vehicles, some animal pulled
carts and farm equipment and lots of thatched roofed structures. Perhaps this
apparent lessor economic condition in the countryside is a reason for the
election of the nationalist, euro skeptic Polish government.
It took about two hours to get to the Oswiecim train
station. Not very large or impressive. We then had a pleasant walk of about
1.5km to the Auschwitz museum site.
I had very mixed feelings walking into the Auschwitz complex.
For almost all my life I had heard about the Holocaust, grown up with people
who had been in this or other concentration camps, read and seen movies and TV
shows about the millions of Jews and others killed as part of what was the
largest attempt at genocide in human history and been both mortified by the
result and mystified/fascinated by the motives of the leaders of this activity
and how the people who had actually carried it out could have done it. Alternately
I hated Germans for doing this but reminded myself that most current Germans
were not even alive when this happened. But all that was academic. I wondered
how I would have reacted if I had been placed in such a position. Would I have
resisted carrying out such orders? Would I have fought against such actions? Although I anticipated a grim experience, I
felt that visiting this site could be an essential element in better
understanding the full evil of the Holocaust.
Before our 12:30 pre-reserved, compulsory English language
tour we checked our bags and toured the outside museum exhibits. Initially we viewed
a movie that primarily focused on the liberation of the camps by the Russians
in January 1945.
The tour guide was excellent. Much of the following was what
I learned from her, a collage educated descendent of Holocaust survivors, but
also from Bloodlands, a book on the killings in Eastern Europe between 1933 and
1945 by Timothy Snyder, a Yale History professor. Auschwitz I, where we were,
was established by the Germans occupiers in 1940 on the site of a former Polish
army barracks. It was originally intended as a prison for Polish political
prisoners and was essentially a work camp. The Nazi plan to exterminate all the
Jews was in full swing then, but it initially was being conducted by special
units within the German SS that following the German army who were charged with
killing Jews in the areas conquered and occupied by the Germans. This was accomplished
primarily by shooting and to a lessor extent, physical violence. About 2
million Jews were killed in this manner in eastern Europe during the first two
years of the war. However, this process proved both to be too inefficient and physiologically
damaging both to some of the German soldiers who carried out this task and to
the people they were corresponding with back in Germany. (I wonder if anyone in
the German army was missing those millions of bullets as it ran out of
ammunition at Stalingrad.) In response, the German leadership decided to establish
mass, industrial scale extermination camps to kill the Jews and others on the
Nazi undesirable lists.
That lead to an upgrading of Auschwitz I by adding gas
chambers and crematoriums, but the real expansion took place with the building
of a much larger, new, second camp at Birkenau about 2km west of Auschwitz I. Birkenau was massive and built as an efficient,
industrial killing facility. It had 300 prison barracks each of which was built
to accommodate 300 people, 4 very large gas chambers that could asphyxiate 2000
people at a time and electric lifts to transport the bodies to the accompanying
crematoria. Eerily the train tracks, which were a spur from the same train line
we rode on, ran directly into the gas chambers. It was at Birkenau where most
of the killing of the estimated one million Jews and one million other victims
occurred. Ironically, most of the Jews killed at Birkenau were not Polish, but
rather from western Europe and other eastern European countries, most notably Hungary
in late 1944 after the Germans installed a puppet government there.
The tour began in Auschwitz I. When the Germans fled in early
1945 before the advancing Red Army they only partially destroyed Auschwitz I,
although succeeding in destroying most of Birkenau. There
are about 30 remaining two story, red, brick buildings in Auschwitz I. The tour
took us through 13 of them, all which house museum exhibits. After completing
that tour, we took a bus to Birkenau. That was very bleak. There was a huge
area surrounded by barbed wire and lots of guard towers that stretched as far as
the eye could see. There were some surviving wooden barracks that were crudely
constructed that gave testimony to the harsh conditions the prisoners were held
in.
At one end, near the site of a crematorium, there is a large
memorial. At the time we were visiting there was a school group from Israel
that was holding a memorial service. The guide told us that German school
groups are frequent visitors, but that was not true for Polish children. She
discussed that while many/most Poles did not participate in the Holocaust activities,
there were many who collaborated with the Germans in these activities. I left
feeling emotionally exhausted.
When we finished it was about an hour before our train departure,
so we took a waiting bus back to Krakow. The vistas from that trip were not
quite as depressing as from the train, but they were not uplifting either. The
bus dropped us off next to the train station we had departed from 10 hours
earlier and we marched back downtown to again checkout the main square at night
and again go through Cloth Hall. There we stopped in at a cafe and had some drinks
while we watched the world pass by.
We had dinner at a small Polish restaurant off the square. No
pirogis, but Polish stew and beef. Walked back to the apartment along the
usual route. Getting very familiar with the art exhibit.
P.S.I wonder if the law passed in Poland after my visit that
precludes and makes it a crime for anyone to speak negatively about the Polish
role in the Holocaust or to attribute any Polish complicity in the killings will
preclude the Auschwitz guides from freely discussing this subject during their
tours.
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| Krakow train station |
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| Auschwitz Barracks |
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| Birkenau Barracks |
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| Birkenau Train spur |
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