It is impossible to travel to Eastern Europe without experiencing humbling and heart-breaking realizations of how deeply and profoundly the actions of one group failed humanity over 70 years ago. Being from the United States, I have read about this segment of history, I have studied it, but I have never felt so entrenched in the emotion and pain resulting from it as when I spent a few weeks exploring the countries that were impacted the most. Travel is, of course, great for the stories, the memories, and the strategically framed Instagram photos, but above all else, it is the best way to venture towards a deeper understanding of the important and devastating history of this world.
I visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp over six months ago, and writing about it in any length has seemed to be an overwhelming undertaking that I have put off continuously. I am doubtful of my ability to put words to metaphorical paper to accurately describe the experience, because I don’t think I can do it justice. It is in no way, shape, or form a fun day trip; you will leave feeling sick to your stomach, your mind reeling with questions impossible to answer, overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of your emotions. But this day trip is absolutely essential, in my mind, for anyone who has the opportunity. You can watch Holocaust films, you can visit the Holocaust museum in Washington DC, you can even visit Schindler’s Factory in Kraków while you’re there, but nothing will be as affectual as walking in the footsteps of the victims right there at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The camp is about an hour west of Kraków, which is an easy drive or bus ride from the center of the city. The town is called Oświęcim, and the train from Kraków is between 12 and 14 zloty, or about $3 to $3.50, and entry into this world heritage site is free of charge (trains in Poland are a pain in the butthole, and the bus station is close to the camp, so bus is definitely the way to go).
Auschwitz-Birkenau is open for visitors 7:30 am to 6:00 pm April, May, and September, and 7:30 am to 7:00 pm June, July, and August.
There are also options to sign up for a guided tour and take a bus there alongside a tour guide; I took a bus with the people I was traveling with, but forewent getting a tour within the camp. In a way, it feels uncomfortably disrespectful and insensitive to roll up to a place of such great suffering in a gigantic tour bus, park next to other gigantic tour buses, and descend upon the place in a mass of fanny packs and sensible walking shoes. The fact that it is actually a very popular destination and always overrun with tourists is almost distressing; I think it is a very important trip to make and one that everyone should be compelled to do at least once, but the crowds and clamoring to gather around a tour guide, get photos, and cross something else off your bucket list feels like it cheapens and detracts from the gravity of what the camp represents. This is unavoidable for any historical site, so it is important to try to immerse yourself into the camp and its history as much as you can despite this, and approach the camp with a maturity and a promise to yourself to respect and acknowledge the lives lost here.
History:
This network of concentration camps is perhaps one of the most gruesome, most prodigious exemplifications of genocide and the evil of humankind in the entire world, a genocide brought about by the propaganda-fueled anti-Semitism and subsequent bigotry and the perceived need for racial cleansing. One in six of those killed in the Holocaust died in the camp, and about 85% of those who entered the camp did not leave alive. It was not long after the Nazi regime seized power that Jews were stripped of their rights to practice their own professions, stripped of their citizenship at the hand of the Reich Citizenship Law, and forced to emigrate to other parts of Europe. The Nuremberg Laws prohibited Jews from marrying Germans. They became more and more alienated; eventually Poland was invaded in 1939, and tens of thousands were murdered.
Auschwitz was first annexed in 1940 in the town of Oświęcim from a site of 16 old, one-story army barracks, its intent to hold Polish political prisoners ripped from ghettos all over the region. It originally served as a prison camp, labor camp, and the administrative center for the effort. Less than a year later, over 10,000 had been shipped to the camp and imprisoned. Upon over-congestion, Birkenau was developed, which served as a concentration camp and extermination camp. Prisoners were crammed into barracks with small shelves used as community beds, and most were ultimately gathered by the Nazis, with an alarming detached sense of efficiency, and transferred to one of the four creamatoriums. In the end, over one million victims were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau prior to the camp’s liberation by the Red Army in January 1945. Over a million victims, and still just a fraction of the total who lost their lives in the genocide.
Auschwitz I
This was the first part of the camp that was developed, and subsequently the first that most people visit. The day that I visited, though a bit wet from the rain the night before, was bright and sunny, so bright and sunny and warm, in fact, that it seemed wrong. In media sites of horror and death are portrayed as being under a perpetual ominous grey sky, but even Auschwitz-Birkenau had its sunny days. And even blue skies did not do anything to brighten the mood.
We walked through the infamous entry gate, the words arbeit macht frei (work sets you free), a phrase common across all Nazi camps, at once setting a solemn tone. The camp is divided into “blocks,” brick buildings that served as prison cells and sites of torture, the compound surrounded by electric barbed wire and wooden watch towers. Most of buildings have now been converted into museum exhibitions to which the public has access, including displays of the items that were lost or stolen from the victims: rooms filled with shoes, luggage, hair, clothing, artificial limbs, and toys, the abandoned possessions climbing the walls in devastating quantities. You see the gas chambers where victims were thrown, killed with Zyklon B, swift, easy, cheap. It is unfathomable, and incredibly difficult to stomach.
At the entrance was where bodies were displayed to serve as an example to others. You continue on to block 10, where Dr. Josef Mengele carried out his human experiments on the healthy women who arrived at the camp. Between the tenth and eleventh block is the death wall, where prisoners were lined up before the firing squad. Walking by the wall broke me down into sobs. Though impossible to imagine, the fact that you are standing there, exactly where it all happened, staring into the bleak, rudimentary wall against which so many were murdered in such a brutally cruel way, is enough to move you to tears. The sign in front of the courtyard containing the wall instructed visitors to remain silent in respect for those whose lives were lost, but I cannot imagine anyone would be able to find words to utter.
Birkenau (Auschwitz II)
Upon completing our walk through Auschwitz, we climbed back onto our bus and sat quietly on the ride to the second camp, Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau. Though I came on a bus, there are shuttles between the camps every 30 minutes for those who decide to come in on their own. Birkenau is much larger than Auschwitz I, constructed upon the reality that the overly-congested main camp did not meet the need, ultimately serving predominately as an extermination camp. It is less revamped than Auschwitz and therefore more authentic, with fewer gates sectioning off parts of the camp, the burned remains of what once was there and what was destroyed by the SS a week before the liberation still on display. There is a long railway that runs through a large archway and along the center of the massive sprawl of land, the same railway that brought in the trains packed to the brim full of prisoners, some dead before reaching the final destination.
This scene alone renders you speechless; any history book or a simple Google search can provide you with photos from this very spot, and everything, from the tracks to the pebbles lining them, is almost precisely identical to what the prisoners saw after being unloaded from the trains. Nothing brings you to earth faster than standing exactly where they stood, seeing almost exactly what they saw, and trying to imagine the terror that they felt as many of them were taken straight from the train and to their deaths, separated from their brothers, mothers, sons and daughters.
Birkenau was drawn up as part of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question once it was decided that the race would be exterminated. The original plan was to send the Jews far away from Europe, perhaps to Madagascar, but the final solution was this. Not everything is always as it seems, and the entire operation was nothing but a gradually escalated decision-making process until it became one of the most destructive events in world history.
The barracks are open to the public, where prisoners were stuffed into wooden shelves, laying on top of each other day after day, just to await their ultimate death in the creamatoriums, and the dirty, cramped, inhumane reality is shocking. So many of them died simply from starvation and disease as a result of these living conditions. Walking along you can also see the remains of the creamatoriums, where most of the prisoners were burned alive, their ashes dumped unceremoniously into the pond.
“To the memory of the men, women, and children who fell victim to the Nazi genocide. In this pond lie their ashes. May their souls rest in peace.”
I think one of the most disconcerting parts of the day was the endless sun beating down so vigorously that I had to strip out of my sweater. In the daylight, the juxtaposition of the green grass and blue sky is unnervingly pleasant. But that’s the thing. The Holocaust was not in black and white. It didn’t take place under the cover of a cinematically manufactured dark sky, it wasn’t a fiction scripted by dark and twisted minds. It was real. It took place on days like this. Beautiful, seemingly perfect days, just like this.
You’ll probably feel a mixture of dread, nervousness, and excitement at the prospect of this trip. It will haunt you, it will make you uncomfortable, it will hurt. You may decide to forego a visit for this combination of reasons, but backing away from the boundaries of your comfort zone, in my opinion, is not the best way to live and grow. If you are able to find humor in Holocaust jokes, if your understanding of what happened is limited to the colorless words in your history textbook, this is a trip you need to make. This is not something you can comprehend from a textbook. It is growing more and more distant, a memory that belongs to our ancestors and that will never directly belong to us, but the acknowledgment of its immense impact cannot go ignored. It must be acknowledged.
It is commonly said that those who do not learn history are condemned to repeat it, and it is true. What is the purpose of life, not just our own but the lives of all humankind over the course of the lifetime of Earth, if not to progress and mature? Ignorance and refusal to recognize certain less positive aspects of our world’s history will only lead to societal demise, again and again. It is clearer than it has been in my entire lifetime that the types of attitudes that led to this horrific stain on our history are still widespread throughout the world, even throughout even the United States, a country founded on acceptance and diversity. Bigotry is not dead yet, and we would take heed to remember these things in the coming years a little bit extra.
Though it is difficult and sad, unbearable and painful, this was far and away the most fascinating place I’ve ever gotten the privilege of visiting. It only took an afternoon, but I am a better person for it.
