Auschwitz and Birkenau

I have written and rewritten this post dozens of times. I’m not sure words are sufficient to describe what a touching, soul wrenching, moving, and horrific an experience it is to visit Auschwitz and Birkenau. Writing these words now fills my soul with the ache that was ever present during the time we spent there and for many hours afterward. I am aware that I am well known for my gift of hyperbole and exaggeration but this is not one of those posts.

Auschwitz is place filled with ghosts, malevolence, and evil. There were buildings I was physically unable to enter because of the feelings that overcame me. Overwhelmed me. Even though my husband does not believe in things like ghosts he too said he felt the lingering evil in that place.

This former concentration camp has been turned into a museum. Tour guides are available but we chose to purchase a written guide and go around by ourselves. You can walk through many of the buildings and learn about the people who lived here, those who worked here, those who died here, and even the rare few who lived. Photography was not allowed inside the buildings.

Inside one room was a smaller area captured behind glass, filled to the ceiling with the human hair that was shorn from people before they were killed. Other rooms were filled with 40 kilograms of eyeglasses, 12,000 pots and pans, innumerable suitcases, artificial limbs, and more. These items once belonged to the people who were murdered here.

One display held innumerable empty canisters of Zyklon B, the agent used to kill people in the gas chambers.

Outside on the walkways tall guard towers can be seen at regular intervals. Barbed wire fences separated the inmates from freedom.

There was a series of buildings that each held a memorial for the different nationalities and ethnicities of people who died here. We entered Block 27, the building honoring the Jewish inhabitants of Auschwitz first. Further along were national exhibitions for the French, Russians, Romany, Polish, Czech and others.

Everywhere throughout Auschwitz were the names and faces of women, men, and children who died here. Who died for no good reason other than evil and hatred.

A short drive from Auschwitz is Auschwitz II or Birkenau, as it is more commonly known. If Auschwitz was emotionally draining then Birkenau was the final punch of disturbing reality. As you drive up to Birkenau, it is impossible to ignore the devastatingly massive scale of the place. It is 175 hectares in size – the size of over 320 football fields.

It took us almost thirty minutes to walk in silence from the entrance gates to where the crematoriums used to be located. We walked along a path with train tracks that once carried prisoners to their deaths on one side and the women’s barracks on the other.

At the end of that long walk are the remains of the gas chambers where innocent people were killed. Near to these harsh reminders of evil lies the Auschwitz Birkenau Memorial. In numerous languages surrounding the memorial can be found these words:

“Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity where the Nazis murdered 1,500,000 men, women, and children, mainly Jews, from various countries of Europe.”

Visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau where the Nazis murdered an untold number of people affected me in ways I am literally unable to put into words. Evil was at work in these places and I felt it still lingering there all these decades later.

I know there are people who claim the Holocaust never occurred but those people cannot have ever been to this place where not even birds will sing. I hope I never again feel the aura (for lack of a better word) of hatred as I did that day. The atrocities that were perpetrated in these places must never be forgotten, denied, or ignored – they are a stain on the collective soul of the human race.