Auschwitz (His and Her Perspectives)

We visited Auschwitz/Birkenau in Poland on August 5th, and it has invaded our thoughts, conversations, and dreams since. This is a LONG post, and downright serious, so get some coffee. My post is concrete, including details of the day and facts that I've learned. Bill's is a more philosophical look at how the Holocaust happened and what we need to do to prevent it from happening again.

Kenzi's Thoughts: 

Auschwitz was all kinds of awful. Worse in some ways than I imagined, because I learned much more than I knew before. Turns out it was really the nearby Birkenau concentration camp (called Auschwitz II) that killed more people than Auschwitz I. The day we visited was beautiful, hot, sunny. 

We arrived in a group of seven people, with a local Polish driver, whose Grandpa is a survivor of Auschwitz but won't ever speak about it. Our arrival was a bit chaotic as our driver flirted with the lady parking attendants, then ushered us quickly past the ticket line, through security, got us decked out with headphones, and dropped us with our larger tour group. Unfortunately, you cannot enter Auschwitz during the peak hours of the day without a tour guide (thus the headphones so the tour guides don't have to shout). 

We immediately passed into Auschwitz underneath the notorious "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign, which means "work sets you free" in German. Sheesh. What a loaded phrase. 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz/Birkenau, approximately 90% were Jewish (the rest were Roma gypsies, Russian prisoners, homosexuals, handicapped, and people from other ethnicities). The vast majority were killed in the gas chambers. Most of the death camps were in the land that used to be Poland (before Germany took it over): Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek. I'm guessing that putting these death camps in Germany would have been too close to home for the Nazis. 

The victims that didn't die in the gas chambers died from being worked to death, from starvation, from diseases due to lack of sanitation (imagine dying from diarrhea), from exhaustion, from cruel medical experiments performed on them, from freezing during the winter. The suffering they experienced is unimaginable. The loss of dignity, privacy, basic human rights, and hope would have been unbearable. Perhaps some died from overwhelming grief. I think I would have. 

Building 11 at Auschwitz I is notorious for being the building of no return. This is where prisoners went when they got in trouble. The basement was full of dark prison cells. Sometimes the Nazis crammed them so full of people and because the ventilation was lacking, everyone suffocated. I think the worst cells in Building 11 were the "standing cells". They measured approximately 3 feet x 3 feet. You had to crawl through a tiny, short doorway to get into them. The prisoners weren't usually alone in there. They had to share this standing cell with sometimes up to four people. There was no room to sit, thus the name standing cell. Occasionally, they had to spend all night in the standing cell, likely not sleeping at all, and then go to work the next day like normal. 

Our guide did a nice job of pointing out day to day issues that I hadn't thought of before. There was no soap, there was no toilet paper (Lord knows what the ladies did during their periods), there were no clean clothes. Often when people were killed in the gas chambers, their clothes were given to new prisoners. There was also no grass, like there is today. The camps were mostly mud and Auschwitz leaders had not yet solved the sewage problem. So prisoners walked through mud and sewage every day.  Worse yet, the crematoria were often backlogged, so there would be piles of dead bodies waiting to be burned. I can only imagine the smells: sweat, sewage, rotting bodies, burning bodies.

Two things especially struck me: 

1. The Nazi guards would lie to the prisoners entering the gas chambers, even up to the VERY last minute. They would tell them to strip down to naked, because they were going to take showers. Some of these changing rooms had shelves and hooks for their personal belongings. The Nazis would even tell them to remember which hook/shelf they left their clothes on so they could retrieve it after their shower. I can only imagine lying to the victims made the job of killing them a bit easier. 

2. Because all the Holocaust pictures I've seen were in black and white, I was startled by the colors of the victims' personal belongings. We saw a giant room full of kitchenware that the people had brought with them, because of course, they had been told they were getting "resettled", so why wouldn't you bring your favorite tea kettle with you? Their kitchenware was blue, green, red, yellow. The colors brought them to life. Likewise, there was a room of thousands of the victims' shoes. Most were brown leather, but occasionally, you'd see a pair of colored women's heels. Dressy shoes. Again, why wouldn't you bring your favorite fancy red shoes? 

Walking through one of the gas chambers was chilling. It took up to 20 minutes for the poison gas, Zyklon B to kill everyone. The suffering of those last minutes is unfathomable. 

Much of the dirty work of killing hundreds of people a day was delegated by the Nazis to a group of male prisoners called Sonderkommandos. These poor souls would go into the gas chamber after everyone had died and it had been ventilated. They would collect glasses, gold teeth, and anything else of value from the dead. Then they would collect the bodies for burning in the crematoriums. I cannot imagine a more difficult job. Every three months, all the Sonderkommandos were killed and replaced with a new generation of Sonderkommandos. 

The beauty of the grounds today was so deceptive. Both camps had clean rows of brick buildings, green grass, blue sky, white clouds. One might be convinced that it was a college campus. Except it wasn't. The thing is, there's nothing wrong with the place, the ground, the trees. What's wrong is the history that played out on that land out in the middle of the Polish countryside. What people did to each other there. 

The scariest part is that the perpetrators could have been me. Countless people were involved in the Holocaust in peripheral roles. They might not have personally murdered anybody, but they were a part of the larger Nazi machine. Accountants, cooks, resellers, drivers, family members of guards, etc. Everyone was brainwashed into believing that certain people were bad, that Utopia would be achieved if the bad people were gone. It really makes me wonder what false beliefs I've adopted. And more than that, it makes the comments of a certain presidential candidate regarding Mexicans and Muslims all the more terrifying. 

I cannot imagine what the Holocaust would have done to the victims' faith. Bill told me the story of a prisoner who said that God would have to ask for his forgiveness for putting him through the torture of the concentration camp. 

As you can see, we have a lot to say about our visit to Auschwitz. It is a haunting place to visit, and we've done quite a bit of reading and talking since our visit. It's a place that sticks with you, one that probably everyone should visit. 

God help us not to repeat the past.

Bill's Thoughts:

Much has been written about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, the following is my perspective after visiting Auschwitz, pretty much a kids book report compared to what others have done, maybe I'm just stating the obvious, for sure I'm making huge over-simplifications, but this is the best I've got. I sincerely hope I'm not offensive in anyway to the Jewish population.

Auschwitz is the infamous Concentration/Death camp that the Nazi's ran in Poland. It was an industrialized means of murdering Jewish people at a scale never seen before. More than 1 million perished at Auschwitz and the few survivors were subjected to astounding atrocities. I'm not Jewish and I only have a very few friends and acquaintances who are direct descendants of holocaust survivors so I feel my background on what was done is thin. I think it is worthwhile for everyone to understand not only what happened in the Holocaust but the circumstances that led to the genocide of Jewish Europeans as this will go a long way to prevent it from happening again. This was perpetrated by humans just like you and me and it could happen again.

Perspective

Again, I just can't understand how sane and rational people could do what was done. Putting things in perspective, I watched a figurative army of doctors, nurses and hospital staff literally work around the clock for a week to fix my wife's trachea issue, dramatically improving the quality of a single life on this earth. On the opposite end of the scale we have the Nazis, a literal army, trying to kill as many innocent lives as they can. The same basic skills are at the disposal of each army here: intelligent, educated and motivated people. How? To prevent we must understand how.

We glossed over the start of hostilities toward the Jewish population in the post about Berlin but to recap: a bullying, fanatical leader was able to literally kill his opposition and unite the remaining people with a campaign of fear and hate against what he painted as a common enemy in Jewish people and other minorities. After sowing his seeds of hate, he reaped a bloody harvest in the genocide of European Jews.

Genocide

Genocide means killing, or attempting to kill off, an entire race or religion, the aim is to indiscriminately kill every last man, woman and child of the group so that they no longer exist, this is beyond war, beyond occupation, it is extermination and it is about as reprehensible a human act as one can imagine.

For background Wikipedia has the steps that precede a genocide. They start with a division of "us and them" in the population driven by religious or ethnic lines, progress to forcing symbols on the group, then dehumanization where the group is treated as something other than human. After that things start to escalate to organization for killing, polarization against the group via propaganda in an attempt to bring the entire population to support the genocide, physical separation of the group, extermination (murdering), then finally denial.

Evidence

Auschwitz holds key evidence that proves the Nazi atrocities really happened, despite their best efforts to cover all traces. This serves to prevent denial and force accountability. At it's most fundamental level, I think this is the function of Auschwitz now, there is a record: papers, pictures, mountains of shoes, kitchen  cookware, and disturbingly large mountains of  human hair from the murdered, meant to be used for mattresses. There are holocaust deniers and much of the key evidence to refute them is held at Auschwitz.

Ideology 

The road to genocide started with the division of the German people into the Jewish and non-Jewish and then treating the Jewish people as if they were not human.

In the case of the Nazis, this division was driven by an ideology that tried to sell the idea that the only thing preventing the Utopian society was the Jewish population. I'll steal words from my favorite author, Steven Pinker, where he talks about ideology being one of the prime drivers of violence "usually involving a vision of  utopia, that justifies unlimited violence in pursuit of unlimited good."

The murdering, however cold and calculating, was not the least bit humane, it was often accompanied by horrible sadism and made no attempt to be humane. The murdered were, many times before death, subjected to atrocities that defy description. Stanislaw Smajzner describes Nazi SS soldiers swinging infants by their feet into concrete walls and them falling down dead in front of their parents, moments later the parents are ushered into gas chambers where they die excruciatingly painful deaths. They were all condemned to death so the SS could do as they pleased. The only act that seemed marginally out of bounds was rape, because this undermined the casting of the Jewish people as subhuman.

All the victims' possessions were turned around and used to support the Nazi war machine: clothing, jewelry, gold fillings and anything else of value. Meanwhile, a small fraction of the condemned would receive a life extension in misery by doing manual labor for the murdering of their fellow Jews, day in and day out, not only watching but helping clean up the murders before they too would be shot or forced into the gas chambers because they knew too much (you can learn more about these Sondenkommandos here). The few survivors of the camps were subjected to beatings, humiliating human conditions, humiliation and being forcibly complicit in the murder of their fellow Jews. There is ample evidence that 6 million Jews died at the hands of Nazis, some of which may have been the most intelligent people of the time, not that it makes any difference, they are people and deserved the right to live.

Prevention

Stealing Pinker's ideas again, a driver in preventing, or reducing violence is empathy which "prompts us to feel the pain of others and to align their interests with our own." Pinker's other three "angels" are applicable as well but let's take a closer look at empathy.

The book Uncles Tom's Cabin is an excellent example of empathy reducing violence. People read Uncle Tom's Cabin and the abolitionist movement started to gain momentum. Understanding that slaves were people too, understanding their suffering and their quality of life recruited abolitionists.

In the same way, we can reduce or prevent future violence by developing empathy for the past victims of violence, by learning about their ordeal, seeing them as human beings and then recognizing circumstances where this is presently happening or could happen and doing whatever can be done to prevent it.

Honoring human rights by continuing to see everyone, including our foes, as humans, especially under the most trying circumstances, is what this essentially means.

After visiting Auschwitz, I spent hours reading stories of Holocaust survivors and I at least feel as though I'm now in a better place of understanding. If you're unable to visit a site like Auschwitz I urge you to read some of the stories of what it was like for these people, these fellow humans.

Not a very good picture, but here's the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign

Pellets of Zyklon B, which emits poison gas for the gas chambers

Empty canisters of Zyklon B

Lots of colorful kitchenware that the victims had brought with them

A suitcase, labeled with a victim's name, in the room full of shoes

The Nazis were decent record keepers. They tracked prisoners with photos and numbers.

A priest who died in place of a fellow prisoner. 

The basement of Building 11, the place of no return. This is where the prison cells, including the "Standing cells" were. 

At Birkenau, a photo of the train emptying and people being sorted. 

The train tracks at Birkenau. Most people (especially women, children and elderly) exited the train and were immediately marched to the gas chambers. 

A train car. Often people died in the train cars on the way to the concentration camps. 

The Nazis set fire to the gas chambers after liberation in order to hide the evidence. These are the remains of the gas chamber that killed the vast majority of the victims at Auschwitz/Birkenau. 

Same as above

One of the MANY barracks at Birkenau that held prisoners. The Nazis would cram as many as 700 people into these buildings.  

Inside the barracks

Lots of barbed wire fencing and watch towers