Into the East: Auschwitz & Birkenau

Probably the most horrible thing that happened during the Second World War were the concentration camps for the "final solution" aka genocide of the Jewish people amongst others. We rented a car and drove from Warsaw which took about 4 hours and is 316 km.

We with our Toyota Avis steed

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the biggest camp where people were brought from whole of Europe by train. The train wagons were very small and there were over 100 people squeezed into them traveling for as long as 10 days without water or food. Many of the people were dead already at arriving. The Nazis promised the Jews all around Europe that there is a center that they have build where everything will be good and peaceful so the people had to BUY their own tickets to Auschwitz. People took all they could with them and whole families travelled in the hope for a better tomorrow. These pictures will illustrate some of it...What caught my attention the most was the magnitude of this place. The camp area is huge! And also it is hard to imagine all the horrible things done here. Human testing, torture, killing, slaughter, famine, children and brutality. Everything was done with such efficiency that it was like a killing factory working 24/7 in getting rid of humans in horrible ways. It seems like human life had 0 value here. I suggest you come here yourself and see it someday, everyone should see and learn and make sure something like this never happens again.

Entering Auschwitz with the gate saying Arbeit Macht Frei - Work and you will be free

Passing to this point all those years ago must have been a nightmare

Heavy barbed wire with electricity

The prisons

The tickets the people had to buy themselves to send them to death camps...

Heavy wire, no way to escape, one 1 exit as well.

Execution wall

Prisoners were hanged up on the walls for hours with arms behind their back. After a few hours of hanging they were no longer any good for work so they were just killed.

Prisoner beds

In the beginning all the exterminated people were recorded. Later on when the volumes got higher no counting system were kept anymore.

Name, profession, date of birth. Everything recorded.

Anyone who tried to escape was shot on sight

Gas chamber nr. 1

Starvation cell where prisoners were kept until they starved to death

Gate to Birkenau...If you came through this about 70 years ago, you left it in ashes...

Panorama view of the camp, please click to enlarge

This toilet was originally a stable for horses. Later it was made into a toilet for 3000 people. Each person had about a few second to use it once in the morning and once in the evening. In the summers it gets 35 degrees so it must have been horrible inside. The guards never came here. One of the only people surviving Birkenau were the prisoners working here.

10 persons were sleeping on each bunk...must have been horribly cold in the winters without any sort of heating. And hot as hell in summers.

Brick barracks for prisoners at Birkenau. There were about 300 of them. In total 100.000 people constanly on the camp and they were making it bigger all the time.

The gas chambers and how they worked. People were offered shower and a place to leave their clothes. The process was very organized and the people perfectly calm because they finally got a shower after their long train ride. They had no idea they were gonna be gassed to death in a few minutes.

After the shower they were put into a much smaller room. For the ones who stood next to the gas holes died immediately but people in the middle could survive up to 20 minutes.

Canada: The place where peoples valuables and things were sorted after they had been gassed to death. There were over 20 trucks filled with clothes, goods and other objects taken from dead people leaving Auschwitz daily.

Glasses