Oswiecim, Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau

These are the first words you see as you walk into the largest concentration and extermination camp of World War II, and they were an excellent frame for my day.  Standing in the place where so many atrocities were committed, reliving that sordid bit of history, and getting minute details about these camps that I was not aware of can not be called pleasant, but was certainly moving, sobering, and a lesson in what bias and power can cause.  Since I'm sure you all know the general history of these two camps, I will just pull out a few details to go with some of my most poignant shots.

These cans contained Cyclone 5, which is a crystalline form of cyanide gas that evaporates at 27C.  It was this gas that was used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau, which is also know as Auschwitz II.  To put in in perspective...each one of the cans above contained enough Cyclone 5 to kill between 1500-2000 people.  (As a measure of the size and scope of these camps, 1.3 million people were killed here between 1940-1944, 1.1 million of whom were Jews, with the remainder being Poles, Roma (the gypsies), Soviet soldiers, and other 'enemies of the Third Reich'.  Most of the Jews sent to these camps were from Poland.  Poland alone had 3.5 million Jews living in it before 1939, and in 1947, there were only 12,000, thanks in large part to Auschwitz/Birkenau.)

When they arrived at the camps, the Jews--most of whom were there because they had been told that they were going to a good factory job--were separated in to groups of men fit to work, men not fit to work, women, and children.  They were then stripped of all their belongings, and sent either the gas chambers (all men not fit to work and most children were sent here immediately), the barracks, or the work camp.  The display above contains 40,000 pairs of shoes that were found after the liberation, roughly 5% of the shoes of the people who came through these camps.  Another display that I feel bound to comment on, though we weren't allowed to take pictures, is a case containing seven metric tons of human hair.  The Germans didn't like to waste things...so they would force the Jews who were working in these camps to shave the heads of the Jews who were exterminated in the gas chambers, and the Germans would export the hair to the mainland to be made into tapestries and sewn as lining into the German soldiers' uniforms.  The hair in the display was found in bales when Auschwitz was liberated.

This was the 'pilot' gas chamber at Auschwitz, where the Nazis tested and perfected extermination by gas.  In this chamber, which was roughly 40' by 40', 1000 people would be crammed and killed at a time.  After the process was finalized, all gas exterminations were carried out at Birkenau, where there were four such chambers.

These are the reconstructed barracks at Birkenau, which are likely recognizable from oft-reproduced photographs of the camp.  The Germans burned the originals barracks before the liberation to destroy the evidence, but the reconstructions are still very harrowing.  Though learning all this definitely made it a hard day, I would recommend going to the camps--most of the details I shared above were conveniently omitted from the history books that I have read, and getting the 'real story', so to speak, makes one think about what let to this genocide...and how to recognize the signs and stop it in the future.