Poland – Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration camps (July 4, 2013).

We added Poland to our itinerary shortly before we left Austin at the request of Nadine, who had read books about the WWII concentration camps in Ms. Carson’s 4^th grade class at Mathews Elementary. Nadine wanted to see the camps first hand.

Driving west from Krakow you pass through several small towns and through a hilly area with nicely plowed fields, somewhat like the eastern part of upstate New York. Nothing on the drive indicates what happened near here 70 years ago other than the traffic signs for Oswiecim, which you begin to see occasionally as you leave Krakow. Oswiecim is the Polish name for Auschwitz and today it is a nice little town about an hour west of Krakow. If you turn left at the roundabout in Oswiecim you will reach the Auschwitz concentration camp in a few minutes.

The original Auschwitz camp is small. The part we walked through looked about 4 football fields square. The entrance to the main section of the camp is under a metal arch that reads, “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” or “Work makes you free.” My first impression after passing under the arch was how so many people could be murdered in such a small place. The Nazis murdered over a million people at the Auschwitz camps, many by hanging and shooting, but more by gassing and working/starving them to death. Although Jews were the primary recipients of this brutal behavior, the Nazis also practiced their torture and murder here on political prisoners, gypsies, criminals and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

We saw the basement cells where prisoners were locked up and starved to death, and the execution wall where prisoners were shot after summary trials. The most moving room we walked through was the shower room where prisoners were gassed. The room is about the size of two Mathews’ classrooms. Adjacent to the shower room is a room containing several large black ovens similar to the ovens you see at Coopers in Llano, except that in front of each oven is a metal gurney-like device about a body length long that can be pushed on a metal track that runs into one end of each oven. Nadine told me that this was the kitchen where they cooked the camp food. There was complete silence from everyone walking through these rooms. You can feel the thousands of people who were killed and incinerated in these two rooms. The pictures in the camp are haunting, both the pictures taken of the prisoners when they arrived at Auschwitz, and also the pictures of the stick thin prisoners who were alive when the Russians liberated Auschwitz in January 1945. The pictures of the child prisoners are tragic.

I can believe that a small number of evil people would organize a mass murder of innocent adults and children. However, it is more difficult to understand how a much larger number of people participated in these murders.

The Birkenau camp is close to Auschwitz, but after spending several hours at Auschwitz we did not have the stamina to spend much time at Birkenau. Birkenau is a much larger camp, most of which was built of wood and is now gone.