Tuesday 2.17 Krakow, Oswiecim

We arrive in Poland by overnight train. Emerging from compartments that stacked 3-4 of us in beds practically up to the ceiling. After checking in to our hotel in Krakow, we prepare for our first trip to a concentration camp. After a quick breakfast, we take a bus trip our to Oswiecim, the town where the Auschwitz camp is located. Auschwitz is shocking for several reasons. Upon entering the gates, one is filled with a sense of foreboding. Thousands and thousands of people, who were murdered by the Nazis, walked any path that one would take within the camp. This is the site where they were starved, gassed, shot, or otherwise put to death in numbers too great for me able to truly comprehend. This is also a site with tour arrows, and glass display cases. Once you get past the sense of dread, the second shocking thing about Auschwitz is that it can feel like a museum; albeit an authentic one. You travel from room to room while tour guides give guided tours, leading groups from rooms, which discuss children at the camp, torture, medical experiments, Roma, medical experiments, and all other terrible aspects of the camp.

The history is grim, and the artifacts are gristly. There is a room full of a display case consisting entirely of human hair, shaved from inmates upon their arrival. There is a room full of Red Cross photographs of people starved to less than one half their bodies weight; literally walking skeletons. In the basement of one barrack, the tiny rooms where Nazi doctors experimented on Polish political prisoners with the lethal Zyclon B gas eventually used in the gas chambers are across the hall from brick structures where other prisoners were kept standing for days at a time. At the edge of the camp is the most shocking part; the gas chamber. The dark, dingy grey brick building is the site of thousands and thousands of deaths by Zyclon B gas. On the other side of the building is the crematorium. Large ovens lie in front of tracks with carts on them for pushing bodies in. The room was the most emotional for our group. Members left the gas chamber somber and profoundly affected. Auschwitz was not, however, the last camp we were to visit this day.

Birkenau, also called Auschwitz 2, was a couple of miles down the road. If Auschwitz is like a museum, Birkenau is like a big empty graveyard. Bunk houses go as far as the eye can see, and where they end, chimneys from destroyed bunkhouses begin. Tens of thousands of inmates were housed here at a time, taking into account that those housed were the ones deemed healthy enough to work after the “sorting” upon their arrival. Those who were not went straight to one of Birkenau’s four gas chambers. We walk about a mile to get to the back of the camp, in order to view the gas chambers, all of which were destroyed when the camp was liberated by Russian forces. The prisoners themselves destroyed one of the four. As we observe the ruins of the gas chambers, we see deer feeding within the campgrounds. What a surreal juxtaposition of death and life, as we stand in front of the rubble of a gas chamber covered in snow, under the setting sun. We tour the camp for about another hour, visiting a memorial constructed by the liberating Russians, the sauna where healthy inmates actually did shower and get disinfected upon arrival, and a female barrack. The sun sets as we do so, and our long walk back to the bus is in the dark. As we ride back to Krakow, people are pensive at first, but relax increasingly more as the bus continues to move. Everyone is emotionally drained, and tomorrow we will visit the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin, almost five hours away by bus. We will need our rest.