Auschwitz. A time to reflect on horror.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

–  George Santayana.           

From 1977-79, I lived in Germany as a missionary for my church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints).  For part of that time I lived in Munich and visited the Nazi Concentration camp in Dachau several times.  It was a sobering experience.  I was aware of Auschwitz but that experience would have to wait.

Now some 44 years later we visited Auschwitz, the best known, largest and most effective concentration and death camp of the Nazi regime. The camp is located in present-day Poland less than an hour and a half’s drive from downtown Krakow.  At the time the Nazi’s built the camp, this part of Poland was occupied by Germany.

Auschwitz

Auschwitz is in three separate parts: The original camp (Auschwitz I) the second, much larger work camp/ death camp (Auschwitz II or Auschwitz-Birkenau) and a smaller work camp a few kilometers away (Auschwitz III or Monowitz). We visited Auschwitz I & II.

So hard to see the many items that personalized the horror. Literally several tons of human hair, thousands of shoes, eyeglasses, photos of prisoners and people walking to the chambers.

Roughly 1.3 million people were systematically killed in Auschwitz, either through overwork, exposure, poor nutrition, medical experiments, firing squad, or the hundreds of thousands that went straight to the gas chambers on arrival.  About 90% were Jews. 

The four crematoriums in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex had the capacity to gas and cremate 5,000 bodies a day. The sheer size of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp is hard to fathom.  To make killing more efficient they eventually ran a spur of the railroad right into the camp to be closer to the gas chambers.

On the last days of the camp’s operation, the Nazi’s tried to cover up their activities by blowing up the gas chambers and crematoriums and burning records and sending most of the rest of the prisoners on a death march towards Germany.  They did destroy a lot of records, but not all of them, and some of the buildings but not all of them. 

Survivors of the camp were adamant that it be turned into a museum and permanent record of the atrocities so that no one would forget what happened there.  Auschwitz first opened as a museum just two years after the end of the war.

Krakow Jewish Quarter and Ghetto

The next day we toured the Jewish quarter of Krakow, and the nearby Ghetto where the Krakow Jews were forced to live for two years before finally being deported to Auschwitz for extermination.  At the beginning of the war, 25% of Krakow’s population was Jewish. Of the 68,000 Jews living in Krakow at the beginning of the Nazi regime, only about 3,000 survived.

There is not much physical evidence of what happened here. All the buildings are still in use, there just aren’t many Jews living here anymore. Just a few signs and memorials in the area note what happened there, so it was really important to have a good guide who explained it all.

These two days were stark reminders of the worst and best in mankind.  The worst:  Those who use propaganda and whip up emotions in the populace to denigrate an entire group of people, giving license for the zealots to treat that group as sub-human, justifying the systematic suppression and in extreme cases, the extermination of that group.  The best: those who risk their own lives to fight against such lies.   Truth matters.

Next up:  More of Krakow.