Auschwitz - Through My Lens

The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps is one of the most horrific sites I've ever visited. They were used by Nazi Germany during World War II to exterminate almost 1.1 million prisoners. Transport trains delivered Jews to the gas chambers where they were killed with the pesticide Zyklon B. A visit to this camp can be heart wrenching but I highly recommend it.

Most people don’t realise that there are actually two camps to visit - Auschwitz I & Auschwitz II-Birkenau. There is a free bus that will shuttle you between the two camps. Make sure to book your tour online in advance directly through their website - http://auschwitz.org/en/visiting/ Buses to Auschwitz (Oświęcim) can be found at the main bus stop near the station and will take you directly to the main entrance of the museum. If you’d prefer to avoid the hassle of making these plans on your own, there are plenty of tour operators in the city who will organise tickets & return transport for you for a slightly higher price. We took a morning bus from Krakow and reached there in time for lunch. There are a few restaurants just across the road from the main entrance. The tour can take approximately 3.5 hours and there’s a lot of walking involved so wear comfortable shoes.

The basis for Auschwitz consisted of 22 prewar brick barracks buildings. Over time, the camp expanded steadily in both organisational and spatial terms. At its peak in the summer of 1944, Auschwitz covered about 40 sq. km. in the core area, and more than 40 branch camps dispersed within a radius of several hundred kilometres.

The Auschwitz Concentration Camp opened in former Polish army barracks in June 1940. Twenty brick buildings were adapted, of which 6 were two-story and 14 were single-story. At the end of 1940, prisoners began adding second stories to the single-story blocks. The following spring, they started erecting 8 new blocks. This work reached completion in the first half of 1942. The result was a complex of 28 two-story blocks, the overwhelming majority of which were used to house prisoners.

As a rule, there were two large rooms upstairs and a number of smaller rooms downstairs. The blocks were designed to hold about 700 prisoners each after the second stories were added, but in practice they housed up to 1,200.

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

- George Santayan

The containers below hold Zyklon-B pellets (hydrocyanic acid) that vaporize when exposed to air. Originally intended for commercial use as a disinfectant and an insecticide, the Nazis discovered through experimentation the gas could be used to kill humans. The brand of Zyklon-B used by the Nazis contained substances which gave the pellets a blue appearance and left blue stains inside gas chambers which can still be seen today in chambers that were left intact.

During the killing process, prisoners at Auschwitz were forced into the air-tight chambers that had been disguised by the Nazis to look like shower rooms. The Zyklon pellets were then dumped into the chambers via special air shafts or openings in the ceiling.

The pellets would then vaporize, giving off a noticeable bitter almond odor. Upon being breathed in, the vapors combined with red blood cells, depriving the human body of vital oxygen, causing unconsciousness, and then death through oxygen starvation.

"Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions." - Primo Levi, Holocaust Survivor

The Germans isolated all the camps and sub-camps from the outside world and surrounded them with barbed wire fencing. All contact with the outside world was forbidden.

On the basis of the partially preserved camp records and estimates, it has been established that there were approximately 232,000 children and young people up to the age of 18 among the 1.3 million or more people deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.

“Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

- John 15:13

St. Maximilian Kolbe was arrested in Poland in February of 1941, and in May sent to the Auschwitz death camp. As prisoner #16670, he eventually laid down his life for another prisoner on August 14, 1941, at the young age of 47.

The Death Wall (reconstruction)

Located in the yard at the side of block 11. The condemned were led to the wall for execution. SS men shot several thousand people there—mostly Polish political prisoners and, above all, members of clandestine organisations.

Birkenau was the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex. When construction began in October 1941, it was supposed to be a camp for 125 thousand prisoners of war. It opened as a branch of Auschwitz in March 1942, and served at the same time as a center for the extermination of the Jews. In its final phase, from 1944, it also became a place where prisoners were concentrated before being transferred to labor in German industry in the depths of the Third Reich.

This freight car has been placed here to commemorate the Jews deported from Hungary who were murdered by German Nazis in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. More than 400,000 Jewish men, women and children were deported from Hungary in similar freight cars. On arrival, most of them were murdered in the gas chambers here.

Two types of barracks, brick and wooden, housed prisoners in the second part of the camp, Birkenau. The brick barracks stood in the oldest part of the camp, known as sector BI, where construction began in the fall of 1941.

Inside each of them were 60 brick partitions with three tiers, making a total of 180 sleeping places, referred to as “buks,” designed to accommodate 4 prisoners. The SS therefore envisioned a capacity of over 700 prisoners per block. At first, the buildings had earthen floors. Over time, these were covered with a layer of bricks lying flat, or with a thin layer of poured concrete. The barracks were unheated in the winter.

The majority—probably about 90%—of the victims of Auschwitz Concentration Camp died in Birkenau. This means approximately a million people. The majority, more than nine out of every ten, were Jews. A large proportion of the more than 70 thousand Poles who died or were killed in the Auschwitz complex perished in Birkenau. So did approximately 20 thousand Gypsies, in addition to Soviet POWs and prisoners of other nationalities.

While they were leading the Auschwitz prisoners onto the evacuation marches and afterwards in January 1945, the SS (Schutzstaffel) set about their final steps to remove the evidence of the crimes they had committed in the camp. They made bonfires of documents on the camp streets. They blew up crematoria II and III, which had already been partially dismantled, on January 20, and crematorium V, still in operational condition, on January 26.