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Room in Auschwitz
A room for ashing clothes. Day 015, Saturday July 2
Today was Auschwitz. Like I said it rained, hard, the day before. Couple that with Alyssa’s foot being border line out of commission, we took it easy, bought her some new shoes (since the others were likely the culprit for the current paediatric problem) and some sweet anti water jackets (raincoats, but my way of saying it is better). We stayed in and planned the next two days with her foot up as best we could.
But today, we woke up at 8 am, and at 9 a tour bus (we booked the night before) came to the front door of the hostel to pick us up. It took about an hour to get to Auschwitz from Krakow, and once we arrived you knew you were there. It was insanely busy, but as we found out it is because there is no restriction to the amount of people who can visit the site at one time, this decided upon, as all decisions to do with the site, by the survivors of the camp.
All structures were left standing and touched up on the interior but only so much as to provide wall plaques
with information and photos, doors inside each building were locked to preserve the artefacts left behind, such as sleeping quarters, and SS offices, but the doors were fitted with glass to view each tableau. The original guard posts were kept standing, as was all fences and barbed wire, even the original bricks from neighbourhood houses that the SS officers made Jews dismantle from their own houses to build the second floors to house more prisoners, causing a shift in colour from the bottom half to the top. The most intense part was a small area between buildings where jews would be taken to be shot, the windows on the buildings on either side were boarded up so other prisoners couldn’t see what was happening, and the original mats put up behind where the prisoners would stand to be executed to catch bullets if they went through was still standing.
Of course there was the gas chambers, kept separate from the prison buildings, again to keep hidden from the rest of the prisoners what was really happening, there was only one smaller above ground chamber still standing as the SS tried to demolish them all when they evacuated the facility.
We got the opportunity to walk through it, see the holes in the roof that the prisoners were told water would come from to clean them in what they were additionally told was a mass showering building. The gas would come in through these holes, physically poured in by soldiers on the roof, 20 minutes it would take until all were dead, and immediately attached to the chamber were trolleys to load the bodies in (a job for the prisoners as well, who themselves would only be kept doing this for about a week then, themselves, killed) the trolleys would be rolled out on tracks to be cremated.
From there we went to what was called Auschwitz 2, the second of 3 camps built, this once was MUCH larger, with hundreds of small single level barn like buildings which in turn held hundreds of prisoners. A set of train tracks ran down the middle and led out the front gate to the rest of the world, the reason Auschwitz was chosen for all this, as it was centrally located to accept Jews and prisoners of war from all over Europe. Most of the buildings, being made out of wood,
Auschwitz 2 Living Quarters
Living quarters made to fit hundreds. were burnt down by the soldiers, once again to cover up what was going on as they evacuated, but the brick chimneys and foundations still exist, looking like an endless field of monuments as far as the eye can see.
Location of the final days of millions.
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