My saddest and hardest post

Today my exploration of Poland took a completely different turn, as I went back to a particularly dark chapter of the country’s past. I drove about 3 hours northwest, to the former death camp of Auschwitz.

Before describing my visit it is worth covering a bit of Poland’s troubled history. In the middle ages, Poland was a typical European country, increasing or decreasing in size as different kings succeeded or failed in battle or diplomacy. In the 18^th century it came under increasing influence from its powerful neighbours, Russia, Austria and Prussia. The three powers twice agreed to allocate large tracts of Polish land to themselves, greatly reducing the size of the Polish state, and then finally in 1797 split up Poland’s remaining territory. Poland ceased to exist as a separate country until the end of the first world war, but its independence was short-lived. Russia and Germany again agreed to partition the unfortunate country, with Germany’s invasion triggering the second world war.

The Nazis and Soviets set about trying to eradicate any separate Polish identity, by murdering thousands of intellectual and political leaders. Even worse was to follow this brutal campaign; at the start of the war Poland had a relatively large Jewish population, which the Nazis set out to eliminate. First, Jews were forced to live in cramped ghettos inside Polish cities; next they were transported to concentration camps, where they were forced to work. Finally, the Nazis built five death camps for the total extermination of the Jewish population of Europe by cyanide gas.

Auschwitz was the first such camp and the only one where much remains to be seen. This is because the Nazis tried to destroy all evidence of their extermination of the Jews before the advancing Red Army liberated the camps in 1945. The four other camps served only as death camps and were completely destroyed. Auschwitz also served as a concentration camp, and although the Nazis destroyed the gas chambers there, much of the rest was left intact. The Polish established it as a museum, so that the memory of the holocaust would not be lost.

My drive to get there was uneventful and passed through some pretty villages and fields. Nothing in this sleepy part of southern Poland could hint at the scale of death and suffering inflicted on over a million people that arrived at Auschwitz.  I parked my car, found the guide I had booked a few weeks before my visit, and together we set off to visit the first part of the complex, Auschwitz 1. The buildings there were surprisingly neat and tidy – before the German invasion, they had served as barracks for the Polish Army, and initially it was used mostly as a POW camp for Polish and Russian war prisoners. We passed through the famous gate, with its ironic inscription “Arbeit march Frei” (Works makes you free).

Inside Auschwitz 1, many of the buildings had been devoted to a museum covering the incredibly tough life in the concentration camp part of Auschwitz, and then horrors of Auschwitz 2’s gas chambers. Moving exhibits included hundreds of shoes and discarded suitcases from victims of the gassing, and discarded cans of the Zyklon B poison used to kill people. Most moving off all was an exhibit of tons of human hair. The Nazis even shaved the hair from the dead to use as a textile material.

Auschwitz 1 was where the very first gas chamber was located. It was a small underground building where the Nazis experimented using cyanide gas to kill Polish and Russian prisoners. Once they had perfected the method, they built a large extension to the camp, Auschwitz 2 – Birkenhau with two much larger gas chambers.

We took a shuttle bus to get to Birkenhau to find an efficiently laid-out flat site. Two railtracks arrived right inside the camp. Trains arrived and disgorged future victims, each carrying the one case of luggage they had been allowed to take on the trip. The arrivals were inspected, and around one in twenty was selected for forced labour and taken to nearby barracks (now mostly destroyed). The remainder were told to leave their luggage, and that they would go for a shower. They were led away to the gas chambers where they were murdered. Their bodies were inspected for anything useful – gold teeth, hair – and then incinerated. For most arrivals, the time they spent alive at the camp was about the same as the time of my three-hour visit. Those that were selected for forced labour usually fared little better – most only survived a few months, and died of cold, starvation, beatings or medical experiments.

Today, Birkenhau has a few remaining accommodation blocks for those selected for forced labour and the ruins of two gas chambers. It also has a memorial to the victims. 1.3 million people arrived at Auschwitz, of which 1.1 million were killed. Most were Jews from around Europe, but there were also non-Jewish Polish victims, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war.

On a hot sunny day in September, it was hard to imagine the scale of the killings on the site. I was expecting that the extinguishing of so many lives would leave some imprint on the fabric of space and time, but although the visit was deeply disturbing, I could not feel anything supernatural – it was simply a flat, hot piece of land with a few buildings on it. It was as if the Nazis had efficiently deleted not just the bodies but the spirits of all these people from time itself and that they had never existed. The Nazis only bothered to record the names of those few arrivals selected for forced labour – the others were simply killed. The only evidence of these people’s brief presence at Auschwitz was the suitcase they had brought and had been made to leave whilst they were led to their deaths. Many of these cases carried a name, so my last photo for today is in memory of Alice Frankel, whose case is one of those on display in the museum. Who was she? Was she young or old? Did she know what was going to happen to her? We will never know.