Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Wednesday 26 September.  Today was a sombre visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. Auschwitz was established in 1940 by the German SS as a prison for Polish political dissidents, taking advantage of an existing Polish army barracks. Very quickly, the Nazis expanded its role to a destination for people from all over Europe who they wished to eliminate from the human race.  Jews, Romas, homosexuals and others seen as a threat to the Reich were brought to the camps. Much of the original camp infrastructure is intact today (despite the best efforts of the retreating Germans to destroy the evidence of their atrocities as they fled the Russian advance) - buildings, rail lines, fencing, gassing ovens and crematoria. We had no idea how enormous the camps were. Birkenau (the second camp established nearby when Auschwitz exceeded its capacity, even by SS standards) covers an area of 171 hectares. It is unimaginable the suffering and depravity that was inflicted on men, women and children. More than 1.1 million Jews, one hundred and fifty thousand Poles, twenty three thousand Roma (what we would call gypsies), one hundred and fifty thousand Soviet POWs and others were transported to the camps. More than one million died in Auschwitz alone. The SS murdered the majority of them in the gas chambers but many died of forced starvation, beatings, the illnesses resulting from living in filthy, unsanitary conditions (in Birkenau the women and children were made to sleep on straw, on benches in buildings designed as horse stables) , or were simply hung or shot in front of everyone at rollcall if they had done something to offend their captors.

The displays in the camps leave little to the imagination. There are enormous piles of human hair (sold to mattress makers by the kilo), spectacles, shoes, prosthetics, and other personal belongings of men, women and children. As you walk through the barracks where people lived for a short time and then inevitably died, the walls are lined with actual photographs of the inmates, all with their heads shaved (men, women and children), and with the dates of their arrival in the camps, and of their deaths – sometimes only days, weeks or months apart. The sleeping quarters and bathrooms show the filth and overcrowding, with no sanitation, ventilation or heating. It is just heart-breaking. Everyone should visit these camps at least once in their lives to put their privileged lives into perspective. These poor people were just born at the wrong time, in the wrong place, or were simply deemed by the superior military power to be a threat or to be ethnically or genetically inferior and unfit to survive.  They suffered the worst crime against humanity simply because of who they were.