The Opposite of Love Is Not Hate, It Is Indifference - Elie Wiesel

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Elie Wiesel wrote the autobiographical book, "Night", based on his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It is impossible for me as a one day visitor to Auschwitz to try and encapsulate in a brief blog entry, the horrors that took place in this place, where for hundreds of thousands of inmates, all hope was lost.



Arriving at the Polish town of Oświęcim (Auschwitz was the German name for the town), we headed to the ticket office at Auschwitz 1 Camp. I had tried to book tickets to visit Auschwitz unsuccessfully last night. On checking at the ticket office, we were advised that we could take a free bus to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the site of the main Nazi Extermination Camp, and then catch the bus back to Auschwitz 1 to take a self guided tour through the complex at 4.00pm.



The camps at Auschwitz consisted of Auschwitz I (the original camp), Auschwitz II–Birkenau (a combination concentration/extermination camp), Auschwitz III-Monowitz (a labor camp to staff an IG Farben factory), and 45 satellite camps. Auschwitz I was first constructed to hold Polish poitical prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. The first extermination of prisoners took place in September 1941, and Auschwitz II–Birkenau went on to become a major site of the Nazi Final Solution to the Jewish Question. From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over German occupied Europe, where they were killed en masse with the pesticide Zyklon B. An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, of whom at least 1.1 million died. Around 90 percent of those killed were Jewish; approximately 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Romani and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet Prisoners of War, 400 Jehovah’s Witnesses, and tens of thousands of others of diverse nationalities.



The selection procedure carried out on the train ramps at Auschwitz was as follows. Families were divided after leaving the train cars and all the people were lined up in two columns. The men and older boys were in one column, and the women and children of both sexes in the other. Next, the people were led to the camp doctors and other camp functionaries conducting selection. They judged the people standing before them on sight and, sometimes eliciting a brief declaration as to their age and occupation, decided whether they would live or die.







Age was one of the principal criteria for selection. As a rule, all children below 16 years of age (from 1944, below 14) and the elderly were sent to die. As a statistical average, about 20% of the people in transports were chosen for labor. They were led into the camp, registered as prisoners, and assigned the next numbers in the various series. Of the approximately 1.1 million Jews deported to Auschwitz, about 200 thousand were chosen in this way. The remainder, about 900 thousand people, were killed in the gas chambers.



Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments. The Angel of Death, Dr Josef Mengele, conducted many experiments on twins, dwarfs and disabled inmates, often without the use of anaesthetic. In mid-1944, about 130,000 prisoners were present in Auschwitz when the SS started to move about half of them to other concentration camps.In November 1944, with the Soviet Red Army approaching through Poland, Himmler ordered gassing operations to cease across the Reich. The crematorium IV building was dismantled,and the Sonderkommando were ordered to begin removing evidence of the killings, including the mass graves.The SS destroyed written records, and in the final week before the camp's liberation, burned or demolished many of its buildings. On 20 January, the overflowing warehouses were set ablaze. On the same day, the gas chambers as well as crematoria II and III at Birkenau were blown up.The raging fires lasted for several days. On 26 January 1945, the last crematorium V at Birkenau was demolished with explosives just one day ahead of the Soviet attack.



As you can appreciate, it was somewhat sobering to walk around Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the camp huts stretched as far as the eye could see, electrified barbed wire everywhere, moats where if a prisoner set foot in one, they would be instantly machine gunned down. The majority of the killings took place in gas chambers within hours of alighting from the trains. The ashes of the bodies cremated in the ovens were thrown into ponds in the grounds of the camp. It is impossible to comprehend the enormity of the evil that engulfed the formerly peaceful town of Oswiecim. As I read the stories of some of the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau, it started to hit home that for many families there were no survivors at all.



At the railway siding there was an original rail car which had been used to transport Jews. I recall Frank Lowy, Chairman of Westfield Holdings in Australia, purchasing a German Rail Wagon used to transport Jews to their deaths, and paying for its restoration in honour of his late father. Hugo Lowy was deported from Hungary in a transport that arrived at the unloading platform in Birkenau in May 1944. During selection, he was classified as fit for labor. He was carrying a parcel containing ritual objects, his Jewish tefillin and tallit. When he refused to leave the bundle behind on the ramp, the SS men beat him to death on the platform. This rail wagon at the empty platform was the one restored and donated by Frank Lowy.



After taking the bus back to Auschwitz 1, we waited for our 4.00pm time slot to inspect the camp. The camp at Auschwitz 1 was brutal in its treatment of prisoners. The prison block cells in which prisoners who broke the rules were housed were inhumane to the extreme. The women who were non-Jews were forced to work in a brothel in one of the blocks.



It was the last worldly goods of the victims that had the biggest emotional effect on both of us. A room full of children’s shoes, a room full of adults shoes, a room full of spectacles, a room full of prosthetics, a room full of suitcases and briefcases (some with the names of the victims engraved). As we exited Auschwitz 1 after a two hour visit, we walked underneath the infamous Nazi Banner at the entry to the camp. Arbeit Macht Frei - Work Sets You Free. We have visited two other Nazi Concentration Camps on our previous trips to Europe. This was, however, our first visit to an Nazi Extermination Camp, and Auschwitz became the largest Killing Factory in history. Man's inhumanity to other humans at the extreme.

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