After waking up at 7am, we filled up on a continental breakfast before heading out onto the coach for Auschwitz, roughly half an hour away from our hotel. We barely even noticed that we had arrived, as the site felt a lot more like a tourist attraction than we were expecting, with the numerous coaches and groups of people standing around. That feeling quickly disappeared as we approached the entrance to Auschwitz 1, the base camp for the entire operation and were acquainted with our tour guide, Ewaline.
The infamous gate was visible in the distance marked with the words ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ meaning work brings freedom. Bitterlyironic, as in reality the prisoners were subjected to abuse, starvation, torture, and death… anything but freedom. The reality of the situation was beginning to become clear, that we were standing in the same spot that millions Jews once stood, as they entered the camp, oblivious to the fact that 9/10 of them would not make it back out again.
The camp looked eerily new; the barbed wire was still intact and the buildings were undamaged, it was as if the Nazis had only just left. We passed the SS guardhouse and camp kitchens and moved to the tour buildings, which were cell blocks that each told another piece of the story. In each room there were various displays, sometimes pictures that the Nazis had taken at the camp. Looking closer at the pictures of the arrival trains, it was disconcerting to see that most seemed oblivious to the extremity of the situation they were now in, perhaps it was the many lies about freedom that they were fed, or maybe denial was their last remaining defence mechanism to stop them from breaking. What was most disturbing was seeing the faces of so many children and hearing the stories of what happened to them, most ripped from their families and killed as they were too young to work. Then to see a room filled with children’s shoes, dolls and toys reiterated that no one was spared from the torture, no matter how young or innocent.
Ewaline spoke about the horrific experiments performed on prisoners in block 10, where Dr Carl Clauberg was trying to perfect non-surgical sterilization by testing on Jewish women. He would often kill them after, and perform an autopsy to see if it had worked. Prisoners were injected with deadly diseases to observe how the body breaks down and starved to find out how long it would take for them to die. The prisoners barely even looked human, with their skeletal faces and ribcages protruding from their skin and even then they were expected to work for over 12 hours a day.
Block 11, known as ‘The Death Block’ was a jail – a prison within a prison, that had cells in the basement for prisoners who had disobeyed the rules, often for minor offences such as stealing bread. It wasn’t like an ordinary jail, they had specialised standing cells where 4 men would be squeezed in and forced to stand all night, then go to work with the other prisoners. The suffocation cells contained only a tiny window, and prisoners would slowly suffocate to death as they used up all the remaining oxygen. The story of Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest, who volunteered to die in the place of a stranger sentenced to the starvation chamber, provided solace and reminded us that even during these horrific times, acts of kindness were still possible.
Nothing could prepare us for the gas chamber, where only 60 years ago prisoners would have walked in a single file line, exactly as we were, but they were walking to their deaths. The outside humidity could no longer be felt in the chamber, the air was cold and sharp and it was hard to comprehend that we were standing in a place where 60,000 people had died. The most disturbing sight was the scratch marks on the walls, some as high as the ceiling, evidence that the deaths were anything but peaceful.
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