"Earth Do Not Cover Their Blood"

March 15. 2009
Part of the reason Amy and I wanted to go to Krakow is because the Auschwitz concentration camps are nearby. The camps are recognizable from history books and perhaps Schindler's List, which took place and was filmed in Krakow, but it could just be the shear volume of prisoners it held and starved or killed in its operation. You don't forget what it looks like.

Auschwitz I was the original camp. It expanded to Auschwitz II and III when the volume was too great. Auschwitz II- Birkenau is the largest of the Nazi extermination camps. It was built by the prisoners and operated by them, under force, which included 4 gas chambers and crematoriums that killed hundreds of their neighbors, friends, fellow people. Not only jews were killed although they were 90% of the population. Catholics, Gypsies (Romanians), Soviet prisoners, Hungarians and Poles were also killed. The total at this camp alone was over 1 million people.

Auschwitz I is in an old army baracks. We had a guided tour which took us into many of the buildings and explained their original purpose. Most of the buildings have been turned into a museum, but the original structure is always in tack. While looking at photographs and models and rooms filled with clothing, shoes, toothbrushes, etc. you are still in the dank halls and rooms of these buildings.

When we left Krakow that morning the sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. As we walked around this camp it got darker and started to sprinkle. By the time we got to Auschwitz II it was raining. Outside the main gate:
Arbeit macht frei ~ Work shall set you free

There was a building we were brought into that was not converted into a museum. It was the court or prison building. This is where people were brought to face trial whether they had committed a crime or not. They were led to believe they were having a fair trial which was immediately followed by a sentence. We walked around the basement where many of the torture cells were. There were rooms that were pitch black, standing chambers, starvation cells.. it was disgusting. There was a cross etched into the wood of one of the cell doors, it must have been done with a fingernail. Outside this building was the execution yard where people who were not sentenced to some form of torture were directly marched outside, positioned in front of the wall and killed.
The first crematorium was built here and experimentation on how much gas was needed to exterminate groups of people was done here. An experiment, they didn't always get it right. Adjacent to the gas chamber is the room with ovens. This is the only surviving crematorium because they destroyed the other, much larger and more thought out, chambers at Birkenau to hide evidence. Just outside this bunker is where the leader of the camp was hung after his conviction.

We visited Auschwitz II as part of our tour as well. After the visit to Auschwitz I its hard to describe your mood. You feel odd taking pictures where people's lives were taken. Its strange to be a "tourist" but I suppose its just a powerful museum. You walk around with headphones on so you can hear your guide and it gives you this kind of disconnected experience from all the other visitors. You don't talk to anyone, what on earth would you have to say. Its weird but at the same time far too surreal to really feel anything.. Its something you think about a lot afterward. When we arrived at Birkenau I appreciated the vastness of it. Despite how the size was related to the volume it saw there was a peace about it. Birkenau, I learned, is translated from the German word for Birch because of all the trees around it. It was like a big field, half empty from the Nazi destruction at the end of the war, and everything left in rubble. But you couldn't hide what hung in the air, obviously, and being their in its final state, still, quiet, abandoned, brought some peace.

At the end of the tracks was a beautiful, simple monument to the 1.1 million victims of the camp. I didn't get a good photograph but there were many other impromptu ones.

Some of the surviving buildings showed us how the prisoners were held. These wooden buildings were first stables. The left over chimney stacks give an idea of how many buildings there once were.

In the Jewish quarter in Krakow there are many museums and monuments. This one was outside a synagoge and I particularly liked it's message. Its a tough day to go and visit these camps but you keep the ground open. And that's something we couldn't do without.