Auschwitz and Birkenau

Laurence Rees, 2005:

[Auschwitz] was a collective enterprise owned by thousands of people, who made the decision themselves not just to take part but to contribute initiatives in order to solve the problem of how to kill human beings and dispose of their bodies on a scale never attempted before.

During its short functional lifetime, Auschwitz evolved from a concentration camp (explaining Arbeit Macht Frei) to an agricultural research facility (yes) and finally to the death camp that we know of today, one that industrialised the killing of its prisoners with appalling efficiency.

1.1 million people are thought to have died in Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

We were dropped off at Auschwitz I first. I was freezing even though I was fully bundled up; I cannot imagine how the prisoners survived daily roll calls, which would last for hours, stark naked in the biting cold.

As many as 3-5 prisoners were squeezed into each individual bunker, and many failed to survive the nights there.

A hallway lined with the mug shots of prisoners that perished at Auschwitz, complete with their dates of entry and death. It put some faces to the statistics that we’ve heard about Auschwitz and the Holocaust; the experience affected me on a more personal level thereafter.

One of these hallways was dedicated to the female prisoners of Auschwitz – it broke me that most of them did not survive past a week in that camp.

I wasn’t very sure if this electric barbed wire was for prisoners then or visitors today, but I’ll assume that it’s the former.

The guard post (on the left) afforded the guard on duty a vantage point from which to shoot at escaping prisoners (or very much anyone he pleased).

Train carriage used to transport prisoners from all over Europe to Birkenau on the right.

The remains of one of the crematoriums at Birkenau, destroyed by the Nazis in a haste at the end of WW2, right before the Red Army arrived and liberated Auschwitz.

I think that it’s important to recognise that Auschwitz was neither the brain child nor directly run by Hitler. The fact that 1.1 million people were so effectively killed in this place was not just thanks to the Nazi leadership, but also thousands of people who, before the war, were average people like you and me. Some of them truly believed in Hitler’s vision of a superior race, but more often that not, the perpetrators were SS sergeants who found such murder unnecessary and even abhorrent; some were even prisoners who functioned as cogs in the wheel of Death in order to survive another day. That such an obscene number of people were killed in the short span of half a decade was the collective effort of thousands of people who in the face of death had their values warped and their fundamental characters altered. I think that that’s what’s truly horrific about Auschwitz.

If you’d like to learn more about Auschwitz – its evolution, the intricacies of the system, how the gas chambers came to be, the mindset of the perpetrators from Hitler to the SS to the Kapos in the camp – do pick up ‘Auschwitz: The Nazis and ‘The Final Solution’ by Laurence Rees, it is an excellent book, insightful, written in memory of those murdered at Auschwitz.