Auschwitz I

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The first camp established by the SS at Oświęcim, germanized to Auschwitz, was in what had been a Polish army garrison. That it was an important railroad junction no doubt contributed to its choice. It was to become the hub of 48 camps and sub-camps. Two rows of two-story brick buildings lay behind an administrative complex entered through a gate bearing the cynical slogan, Arbeit Macht Frei. Perhaps the SS’s idea of a practical joke.

The inevitable records-keeping facilities occupy the first buildings after the gate. Then come the cells for the seniors Kapos, prisoners co-opted to help control the other prisoners, and the punishment section. Between the administrative compound and the barracks is the assembly field where daily, sometimes more, roll calls were held, regardless of the weather. These could last from minutes to hours depending on whether the count of prisoners came out as expected and on the whim of the guards in charge. (A miniature guard tower stands at the front center of the assembly area so the officer in charge of the count could get in out of the elements if the count went on too long.) Also at the front of the assembly area is a railroad rail mounted at the top of two sturdy poles and used for group hangings, intended to warn the camp of the consequences of disobedience or lack of cooperation. Corpses were often left on display to reinforce the warning.

Different barracks served different functions. Most were used to house prisoners. Inmates were separated according to the National Socialist taxonomy of undesirability. Jews were separated from non-Jews, Romany were kept with Romany, Soviet prisoners were held in barracks isolated by a barbed wire fence from the rest. Women had their own barracks. Others contained an infirmary (where among others things, birthing mothers and their newborns were murdered by injecting phenol into their hearts) or holding cells and facilities used by SS doctors to conduct “medical” experiments. Some were for punishment, i.e. torture, others held prisoners awaiting sentencing for additional offenses - communicating with the outside, escaping, trying to escape or assisting those trying to escape. Hearings, trials is too strong a word, were brief and the outcome forgone. Executions, by firing-squad or hanging, took place in the adjoining courtyard.

The bus from Kraków west to the Polish town of Oświęcim passes through miles of rolling green hills and farmland. It is very beautiful. Someone being transported to Auschwitz could be forgiven for hoping that things would not be as bad as everyone feared. The barracks themselves resemble a rather seedy college campus, until you turn and see the multiple layers of (formerly) electrified barbed wire and the guard towers.

When prisoners arrived, they were stripped, shaved, deloused, issued prisoner’s clothing (dirty, louse-infested, ill-fitting), and tattooed with their inmate ID number, their new identity. Badges and other insignia were then sewn firmly to the uniforms identifying the prisoners racial, criminal and political status. Personal items and belongings brought from home were quickly swallowed up in the Nazi reclamation process to be reissued to Germans back home. (One wonders what those people thought about where the eyeglasses, shoes, and clothing came from.)

Several barracks are given over to displaying some of the confiscated items that were found in warehouses at Auschwitz II / Birkenau. Some are familiar, piles of shoes, brushes, crockery. Several are deeply disturbing - a collection of Jewish prayer shawls (why would they keep those except for the mania for order), hundreds of crutches, braces and prostheses, and one long pile of women’s hair, much of it still in braids, 1950 kilograms of it, some retaining traces of the poison used to kill them. In an adjacent case is a display of fabric sold in Germany, made from similar human hair. (This room is one of the few places where photographs are forbidden. A prohibition not always observed.) These exhibits are haunting.

In another barracks, focused on ‘daily life’ among the prisoners, we saw a logbook listing by name, number and prisoner status, those who had been admitted to the infirmary for starvation diarrhea. The perversity of nursing prisoners so that they would be healthier when they were killed is difficult to comprehend.

The path out of the camp takes you past the SS offices and hospital, both housed in buildings that look just like the prisoners barracks, at least from the outside, past the gallows where the last commander of Auschwitz I, Rudolf Höss, was hanged after the war, and past a gas chamber.

The furnaces have been reconstructed from disassembled parts and sit waiting in an adjoining room. The SS tried to hide evidence of their crimes. A fact Hannah saw as evidence of their fundamental cowardice.

The gas chamber itself seems mostly intact. It is a long, low-ceilinged room with square chutes, now covered, every 10’ or 15’ through which the hydrogen cyanide / Zyklon B was introduced. The lower part of the walls is white-washed. Sets of parallel scratches scar the upper part of the wall, the fingernail marks left by frantic victims? I placed my hand flat against the wall, on the whitewashed section. I closed my eyes, and listened again, as I had in the “memory void”, for the desperate screams and whimpers of those who lost their lives in that place.

Later Hannah observed one important contrast between Terezín and Oświęcim. Whereas Oświęcim appears to be a busy, apparently growing small city, Terezín seems stuck in time. Its current population is roughly equal to what it was in the 1940s before the SS turned it into a camp. Sitting on a bench on the town green in the middle of the day, there was almost no activity to be seen. I suspect if you took a sepia-toned photograph of the town center, you might have to look very closely to see any difference from a photo taken in 1941. Perhaps it has been harder for the town, which was itself turned into a camp, to separate from its past, unlike Oświęcim, where the camps were outside of and distinct from the city. Then too, Oświęcim has been continuously occupied, Terezín underwent two, no doubt traumatic, disruptions, in 1942 when the SS ordered the residents to abandon the town, and again in 1945 when the area was liberated by Soviet troops.

Auschwitz is a very disturbing place in which horrific things took place, but it's ordinariness and scale, you could walk briskly from one end to the other in 10 minutes or less, make it feel like you might be able to comprehend what went on there. Not so Auschwitz II / Birkenau.

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