Auschwitz II / Birkenau

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Two miles down the road from Auschwitz I is the second camp by that name, located in another small Polish town. Unlike Terezín that started off as a small walled town, or Auschwitz I that started off as a military garrison, Auschwitz II / Birkenau was expressly built by slave labor for the purposes of exploiting prisoners’ labor and exterminating those too weak to work. It is enormous, covering 400 acres. Hannah and I walked around the site for over two hours and covered less than a quarter. https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005189

It is a actually complex of 10 camps, one for women, one for Sinti and Romany, one for Jews sent from Terezín, etc. Every day work details were marched out to nearby quarries, farms or purpose-built factories to make matériel for the war effort or for consumption back in resource-starved Germany, all on a diet insufficient to maintain human life. Every night the prisoners returned to camp, the tempo of their marching regulated by the music of the camp orchestra, bearing the bodies of those injured or killed by the day’s exertions.

Separate road and rail entrances pass through the iconic gatehouse and through concentric rings of barbed wire. The rail spur, with a couple of sidings, terminates in the middle of the camp alongside it is the sand and gravel ramp where the initial selections took place: healthy enough to work; or too young, too old or too infirm to be worth feeding and therefore destined for immediate extermination.

Those who were to live were marched off to be processed and then to the barracks appropriate to their nationality and political/racial status. Two buildings at the back of the camp complex contain shower rooms, with actual showers, where prisoners stripped and were disinfected and deloused, rooms where their hair was cut off, and others where they were to dry off put on their prison uniforms. A small room, located next to the shower room allowed for the efficient sorting of the prisoners clothing and effects. Cash and other valuables went to the SS treasury, clothing etc went to the warehouses conveniently built just the other side of the barbed wire.

Those chosen to die were herded along the rails to the gas chambers and ovens that lay at the back of the camp. There were 5 killing/incinerating complexes, now mangled by the explosions the SS set off to erase the evidence (or by the prisoners after the Germans began to lose control of the camp). What remains are long, low, brick-walled, now roofless, chambers set into the ground. Stairs lead down into these rooms. At the far end, are the concrete and steel buildings that housed the ovens that could cremate thousands of corpses every day. Their ashes are said to have been dumped in nearby ponds.

Twenty or thirty buildings remain more or less intact, the majority are marked by their foundations and the remnants of chimneys. The standing buildings probably represent no more than 20%!o(MISSING)f the total. It is difficult to see one end the camp from the other even though the land is very flat, broken only by artificial drainage ditches that separate rows of barbed wire.

To the best of my knowledge, nothing transpired at Auschwitz, that did not happen elsewhere in other SS camps. What stymies the imagination is the scale. So many people, so much misery and death, so much cruelty and callousness.

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When I close my eyes and call up the image of the camp I am struck by the immensity of it all, and the thoughtful planning and organization that went into creating, managing, and maintaining an enterprise that encompassed the lives and deaths of thousands of people every day, and resulted in the deaths of millions. The initial impulses that led to such racial animus may have been irrational, but the implementation of the “final solution” was the careful and rational work of thousands of engineers, technicians, clerks, secretaries, police officers and soldiers. People not unlike me.

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