Auschwitz-Birkenau

Building #5, "Material Proof of Crimes" on the Auschwitz campus is open for viewing, as is the building that housed Gestapo interrogation. We visited Auschwitz today.

The first Auschwitz facility was initially a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners and later added gas chambers and a crematorium for the purpose of murdering mostly Jews. This is the facility with the iron Arbeit Macht Frei sign above the entrance that you have probably seen pictured.

A few kilometers away is the Birkanau death factory, with the guard tower at the entrance which you have also probably seen. It was constructed because the capacity for murder of the first facility, 700 men, women, and children in 40 minutes, did not meet German needs. Birkenau could murder 2,000 men, women, and children in 25 minutes.

On their way into the gas chambers the men, women, and children took off their clothes in the undressing area and hung them on numbered hooks. The SS told them to remember the number of their hooks so they could pick up their clothes afterward. After they were slowly suffocated by the Zyclon B gas that arrived in pellets in cans from the IG Farben company, the bodies of the men, women, and children were checked for and removed from any gold teeth and shaved. The lives had no value. The gold teeth and hair had value.

The SS sold the hair to German companies to make mattresses, pillows, blankets, and clothes, including German military uniforms.

After we toured the first facility and had lunch we were bussed to within about a half-mile of the Birkenau camp, to a point where Jews would have disembarked and then we walked the remaining way into the camp. From my memory of growing up in Green Township, Grant County, Indiana, I guess that Birkenau is around a mile long and a mile wide.

One million Jews, 75,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Gypsies, 14,000 Soviet POWs, and 10-15,000 others were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They arrived on trains from all over Europe. The longest journey was for Greek Jews, nine days, 100 men, women, and children per box car without water or food. Nine days.

The Holocaust was the systematic and bureaucratic implementation of Nazi ideology by the Germans and their collaborators who assisted in every country from which victims of the Holocaust came, with knowing assistance from manufacturers and transporters who profited from the slave labor the Nazis provided and from the products the slaves produced. A few people helped the Jews resist. They are heroes and prove by their actions that other choices were available.

This evening we met with Polish educators to discuss teaching the Holocaust in our respective countries. Because of the official government ideology controlling the instruction of history during the cold war, Poles are still early in the process of reconciling their role in the Holocaust. An honest accounting began only around 10 years ago, one instructor told us.

Tomorrow, we visit Jewish and Holocaust related sites around Krakow, including Oskar Schindler's factory.