Well, this day turned out fine but had its moments of uncertainty. I got information from our Airbnb host Filip about which train to take to Oswiecim. It looked legit, so I followed his advice and took the train into the central station to buy a ticket and check the schedules. He had provided the correct information, so I took the 7:23 local, which took about 90 minutes to get there. When I arrived, it took me a couple of minutes to find my bearings, then I quick-walked to the museum. Waited in line to get a ticket, I couldn't verify my reservation, so I bought another (?) ticket for the 9:30 tour, which was about to start. So, very little waiting, which was a pleasant surprise. Our group was rather large, but while walking through the museum area, which comprises the original Auschwitz camp, we had headphones to hear the guide. It worked out okay, although occasionally her voice cut out. I was consistently at the back of the group, slowed by taking notes and pictures. Here are my notes from the day.
2.7-2.9M Polish Jews were murdered in WW II.
Train trip to Oswiecim took about 90 minutes, lots of stops. Saw both Lidl and Aldi stores on the way. Saw a large amusement park not too far from Auschwitz, which seemed incongruous.
The tour started in the Auschwitz camp, walking through a long corridor while with names of people murdered in the camps were broadcast.
Oswiecim is translated into German as Auschwitz. The place of silver birch trees is translated into German as Birkenau. Monowice is third camp (A3), Auschwitz A1. Birkenau is A2 and incorrectly thought of by foreigners as Auschwitz, since it was the most prolific death camp of the three locations.
A1 is 6 hectares, A2 is 140 hectares. Most extermination of prisoners was done in A2, 4 gas chambers & crematoria in A2, 1 gas chamber & crematorium in A1.
Auschwitz 1 was a former Polish army camp, therefore it had better conditions and buildings than A2. Designated for use by the Polish army before the Germans repurposed it after conquering Poland. Initially, it was used to round up and kill Polish, intelligentsia and religious leaders, nearly all men but not all Jewish.
Prisoner orchestra in A1 only played German songs. In A1, 700 SS guards oversaw 13k prisoners.
In February 1942 was beginning of the implementation of the Final Solution plan, 2 years after camp was established. Before then, Jews were shot by Einsatzgruppen. The idea of mass extermination involved using pesticides as killing poison, Zyklon B. Once implemented, disposal of corpses became the hardest step to achieve and thereby slowed the killing rate.
Only Jews went through selection process upon entry to the camp, most went to gas chambers unless they had a skill needed by SS.
1.3M people were shipped to Auschwitz (A1, A2, and A3), 1.1M were killed. Picture
Initially, corpses were buried in mass graves. But these graves were a health hazard and eventually contaminated the groundwater, killing fish in nearby rivers and streams. Because the area was known for its carp fishing, a change had to be implemented, and they created the crematoria.
When they were packed into trains to come to the death camps, Jews were told they would be resettled, and they were allowed 25 kg per person (adult?). Freight train cars were packed with people, up to 7 days without stopping, one bucket in the car. When they arrived at the camps, men were separated from women and children, said to be so they could shower separately. Instead, the men were culled for healthy young men for labor, the others were sent to be exterminated. Nearly all of the Jewish women and children were exterminated upon arrival at the camps. Led to undressing rooms first, then they were sent to underground gas chambers that were purported to be showers.
Hugo Boss was an ardent Nazi from early days. He designed the white SS uniforms fworn by the soldiers overseeing gas chambers.
There was one crematorium in Auschwitz, 4 crematoria in Birkenau, 3 of which were destroyed by Germans just before the Soviet army arrived to liberate the camp, and the last one by the prisoners upon liberation.
Sonder kommandos were prisoners given special rights, in return for ring responsible for disposal of corpses. They were isolated from other prisoners.
The Germans had the idea to use the long hair removed from female prisoners in the textile industry. When the cam was liberated, 7000 KG of hair was found. 2000 kg of this hair was retained as a memorial display in the museum. Also collected were glasses, combs, brushes, shoes, clothes, braces and artificial limbs. Some of these retained items were on display. They pulled gold teeth out and melted them down, took jewelry, money.
Later on, women were conscripted for labor, mostly in A2 . A3 in Monowice had a chemical factory using prisoner labor.
Joseph Mengele performed his medical experiments at A1, he favored identical twins for his tests.
If you were over 45, you were deemed too old to work and sent to the gas chambers.
No locals were allowed near the camp for fear that word would get out about the mass extermination taking place. Eventually, the world was made aware of what was going on, although the scale wasn't fully understood until after the war.
There were 700-1000 prisoners in each building, housed in the cellars or attics, very crowded conditions. The prisoner trusties were known as capos, they needed to speak some German, were generally seen as Nazi sympathizers and therefore segregated from the rest of the prisoner population. For example, the 9:00 curfew was monitored by Capos.
Initially, prisoners slept on straw scattered on the floor, but it was so unsanitary that it was eventually packed into cloth straw mattresses. Tattooing numbers on prisoners' arms was initiated in 1943. All prisoners' heads started being shaved around this time, in part to reduce lice infestation but also to make it easier to identify prisoners.
A total of 325 prisoners, all non-Jewish men, survived 5 years in camp. They likely had jobs that helped protect them and give them a little more to eat.
At least 900 prisoners tried to escape, about 300 were successful. 4 prisoners escaped in the Auschwitz A1 camp kommandant's car, but only one survived to old age. In general, there was a 10 to 1 execution rate for escapees. For each escape, 10 prisoners were randomly selected for execution.
Block 10 was reserved for sterilization experiments. Block 11 was the death block, where prisoners were also tortured, including special rooms where they were suffocated or starved. There was also a wall against which certain prisoners were lined up and shot.
Other camps in Poland, e. g. Sobibor, Treblinka, were death camps and kept no prisoners.
Each day, prisoners were awoken at 4:00am and lined up near the main kitchen for roll call. They were given very meager food rations and were severely undernourished. If there were any prisoners to be made examples of (for example, attempted escapees), they were hanged right by where roll call was performed.
SS troups were housed outside the wire fences.
Rudolph Hoess was first commandant, had wife and 5 children and lived nearby. He was hanged in 1947 on a gallows constructed especially for the occasion, by the gas chamber in A1 and facing the camp itself.
Crematorium heating right next to the gas chamber was used to heat Zyklon B, which is a solid at room temperature and therefore needs a heat source to convert it to gas. In A1, 700 people at a time were gassed in 20 minutes, but it took 2 days to burn bodies. So the extermination rate was determined by how quickly the bodies could be disposed of. The gas chamber at A1 was a Polish army munitions depot before the war.
Birkenau Camp Visit
When it was fully operational, the sky was blackened with smoke from the crematoria. Up to 90k prisoners were housed here, and there were plans underway to expand the camp to house 300k prisoners. Coal mines in this area had been around for quite some time, and so there was an extensive rail network in the area. That's a chief reason why this location was selected for the extermination camps, because they could be readily brought to the camps by rail. At Birkenau, there are mine shafts underneath the camp, which makes the ground very unstable.
Birkenau was built from the ground up to be a death camp. Brick barracks were initially built, but the Germans eventually switched to wooden structures originally designed to be horse stables. There were a total of 30 brick and 250 wooden barracks.
IG Farben chemical plant was populated with prisoner labor at Monovice (A3. This plant was responsible for converting coal to synthetic rubber, since Germany was cut off from natural rubber supplies during the war.
At Birkenau, prisoners would arrive in rail cars on trains, very crowded, and they would face an SS officer upon arrival who would signal left or right, life or immediate death.
The undressing rooms were fairly spacious and right next to the gas chambers, both of which were underground to preserve heat. Up to 2k people at a time were gassed.
During our tour, a group of Jewish men wearing prayer shawls were singing by the remains of one of the crematoria. It was devastatingly sad. There were also a lot of young jews wrapped in Israel flags who were touring the site.
Inside the single line of electric fences was a line of irrigation ditches all around the camp. As part of the security system, these ditches contained human waste to further discourage prisoners from trying to escape.
The camp had a number of isolated but contiguous sections, each of which had its own kitchen building.
Inside the barracks, the windows couldn't be opened, which increased the rish of suffocation and excessive heat in the summer. 700 prisoners were jammed into each brick barracks, 400 in each wooden barracks.
Inside a brick barracks, there were 16 rows of stalls on each side, each stall having three platforms, top, middle, and bottom. Generally, 8 people were crammed onto the top platform, 6 on the. Middle, and 4 at. The least desirable bottom space. Because dysentery was common, human waste would regularly drip down from the upper platforms to the lower ones. Toilets were outside, they could be used once in the morning and once in the evening.
After the tour bus brought us back from Birkenau to the Auschwitz site, I walked quickly back to the train station. There were trains waiting there, and I got on one thinking it would take me back to Krakow. Thankfully, I checked the available information and saw it was the wrong train, so I moved to the other platform and got on the right one. This train ended up taking a different route into the main station in Krakow, which didn't go through our stop. So I decided to walk back to the flat from the main station. Ann was touring churches in another part of the city, so I wasn't missing anything. Got back in about 20 minutes, it was good to get a long drink as I was a little dehydrated. I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning up my notes. Dinner was clean out the fridge night, and we still have some snacks to get rid of. We'll be pressed for luggage space in the morning, so everything will have to be consumed or tossed. It's going to be an early morning since the flight leaves at 6:20.
