Auschwitz

July 5 th 2011

Just a quick note...

We were woken up at 2 am last night by a young drunk American knocking on our door. We asked him what he wanted and he replied that he was wondering whether or not we wanted to come down with him to drink some vodka and have fun. My dad answered that in fact we were all sleeping at the moment to which he replied that we could wake up. Dad said we had children with us and he said: Okay, sorry and left. To quote my sister: My parents are no fun!

July 6^th 2011

Poland

Today was a miserable day cold, grey and raining. We had planned to spend the day in Krakow but decided it was more fitting to visit Oświęcim instead. You may not recognise this Polish name but it's German name, Auschwitz, may sound more familiar. The Auschwitz concentration camp was the Nazi's largest camp, 1.6 million people, 1.1 million of them jews, were killed here during the Holocaust. The camp was divided into three areas, Auschwitz, Birkenau and Monolitz. Auschwitz was the original camp, Birkenau was the largest and where the vast majority of the killings took place and Monolitz was a camp connected to a German metalworks factory which exploited the free slave labour. Monolitz can not be visited but the first two are open for visitors. We started the day off with a visit to Birkenau. Most of the camp was destroyed by the fleeing Nazis but you still get a feeling for it's imensity, with barbed wire and watch towers stretching as far as the eye can see. Jews would come into Birkenau on cattle trains by the thousands from ghettoes across Europe. When they arrived, they would be sorted into two groups, people deemed fit for work (usually about 25 percent) on the left, and people deemed unfit for work (usually about 75 percent) on the right. The 25 percent who were fit for work would then taken to start working while all the others would be marched to the far end of the camp for "de-lousing showers". They would be shown into underground rooms where they had to get naked, and then into the gas chamber, fitted with decoy shower heads. Once the Nazis had crammed as many people as they could into the room, they would lock the doors and start pouring in Zyclon B, a deadly gas. When the victims started chocking and realised it was not a shower they would fight and crawl on top of each other, despereatly trying to find air near the light holes on the roof. 15-20 minutes later, the doors would be opened, the bodies cleared out and a new batch of people sent in for their "showers" while the old corpses were cremated. We looked around in a few of the old barracks and then walked down the tracks to the crumbling concrete ruins of the gas chambers. There was a large memorial with plenty of flowers and rocks (Perhaps the rocks are a Jewish thing because we saw them at the Jewish cemetary in Krakow as well) Past it there was a second set of gas chambers. After seeing Birkenhau we took the shuttle bus back to Auschwitz for the afternoon. The camp at Auschwitz seemed to be more of a work camp than an extermination camp. I think people would generally be worked until they could work no more, unlike at Birkenau where it felt more like it was used for mass extermination as soon as you arrived. Most of the barracks had been filled with Museum exhibits, the most interesting was definetly the one where they displayed all the clothes, shoes, hair, brushes etc., that had been stolen from people entering the camp. Some of the more eerie collections were the 7 tonnes of hair from the dead bodies (used in the German textile industry), a huge room full of thousands of shoes and another huge room full of suitcases with names and dates and sometimes places of origin. The creepiest part of the camp was the still intact gas chamber, I'm not sure whether it was a replica, re-built from the rubble or or the original tester chamber, but it was incredibly creepy being inside. After our visit I was pretty exhausted. It was a lot to take in both physically and emotionally.