Somber day at Auschwitz-Birkenau

I started the day with a nice run that was longer than I anticipated because I got a little lost and had to circle around the Planty park again until I came to Wawel Hill to get my bearings. We still left in time to get to Auschwitz for our tour, although our Tom-tom took us to a different part of town again.

The place looked oddly familiar, maybe because I have seen photos, or maybe scenes from movies shot there. We again had a guide who told us about everything through headphones. I liked the wrought iron sign that says in German "Work makes you free" over the camp entrance. If not for the electrified barbed wire on the perimeter and guard towers, it would have looked like dormitories or a military barracks with tree lined streets and grass and flowers between buildings. They have set up nice exhibits of photos and some models explaining how the camp worked.

One wall was full of photos of prisoners who were assigned to work there, all with their heads shaved and the date they arrived and died. Some said "executed" while other said "died" on the photo. Most lasted only 3-4 months or less. There was a huge pile of human hair and other exhibits with the possessions of the murdered people. We also saw the camp jail and the wall where firing squads executed prisoners. There was also a gallows, as if they needed more ways to kill people. The camp commander had a house just a couple hundred meters from the place where he lived with his family. It was hard to imagine a normal family life for such a monster.

Outside the gas chamber

Inside the gas chamber

Ovens in the next room

It was creepy to  walk into an actual gas chamber, a bare concrete room with openings in the ceiling to drop the poison gas, and then out through the ovens. But most of the people were not killed at Auschwitz but at a much larger camp 2 km away, Birkenau. That was the actual death camp that specialized in killing. That place was vast and had two gas chambers that could kill over 1,000 people at a time. The Nazis blew those up before they left so we couldn't tour them. It seems so peaceful there now with only the ugly fenceposts and some of the barracks style buildings remaining.

Even after seeing everything in person it's still hard to get my mind around the insanity that was the Holocaust.