I don’t
think there is anyway to mentally prepare you for learning about something so
mind blowing and terrible such as the holocaust. Talking about it in class was nowhere
near as crazy as actually seeing everything in person and trying to put
yourself in the shoes of all the victims and trying to understand what they had
to go through and all the suffering they endured.
As I had
expected, once we got to Auschwitz the weather was gloomy and rainy. I didn’t
mind the rain at all, it wouldn’t have felt right if it were nice out and the
sun was shining. Overall the whole camp itself had such an eerie feeling about
it, to think that thousands of people were beaten, tortured, starved, and
killed in the exact spot we were at was too much to take in. Auschwitz I had
before been abandoned Polish army barracks, which were then taken over by the
Nazi’s in 1940 and turned into the largest death camp in history. Auschwitz II
or Birkenau, which it is commonly known as, was built by the prisoners and was
even larger than Auschwitz I. There was a camp on one side of the train tracks
for the women, one on the other side for the men, and then a third camp that
was being built that was never finished. It was estimated that 1.1 million
people were murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau camps. Over 1.1 million men, women,
and children, murdered in order to obtain the Nazi’s idea of the “perfect
race”. How insane does that sound? How humans could do something so absolutely
disgusting to one another, and to think that something this terrible was
happening only 70 years ago. It really makes you question the human race.
We entered
the gates of Auschwitz with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” translating to “Work
will set you free” written above our heads which was a complete lie. Ninety percent
of the people that were transported to Auschwitz did not make it out. The
selection started as soon as they arrived, they were either immediately sent to
the gas chambers to be killed or were sent to work and live in terrible
conditions. They were told they were being sent to live in better places, away
from their countries because they were no longer wanted there. When they
arrived to Auschwitz everything was taken from them, their clothes, their
suitcases, families were split up and never saw one another again.
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| The gates to Auschwitz |
During our
tour we entered rooms that would send chills up your spine. Rooms filled with
people’s belongings, thousands of shoes, eyeglasses, pots and pans, hairbrushes.
The worst of all was over 2 thousand pounds of human hair that was shaved off
of thousands of victims before they were killed. My heart sunk after seeing all
the baby clothes and shoes, the children were too little to work so they never
even had a chance, the Nazi officers saw them as “useless”.
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| Some of the shoes from the victims |
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| Suitcases of the victims |
It’s hard
for me to wrap my head around what all happened over this tragic time in
history. Thousands of people were killed at a time in gas chambers, which were
then destroyed by the Nazi’s to cover up for what had actually been going on
for years. How this went on for so long and how it was seen as a “solution” is
insane. After the camps were liberated in 1945 they were then preserved and
reopened in 1947, as a museum to make sure this horrible time would never be
forgotten. The craziest thing to me is that actual survivors of the concentration
camps were the ones giving tours and telling their actual stories when the
museum first opened. I can’t understand why someone would want to relive the
horrific time they had in these camps, but I do think it’s good that they
wanted everyone to know what all happened.
