We decided to add a visit to the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau as a final point of interest on our genealogical trip to Poland. It was about an hour and a half cab ride north of Krakow. As you can imagine, touring a concentration camp is not a pleasant task, but it was an important one for a trip themed around life and death.
All of our sources suggested purchasing tour tickets well in advance, as it is an “important” tourist destination. Much of the concentration camp area is free and open to the public. However, the museum offers reasonably priced small group tours in various languages, including English. The professional guide leads about 30 ticket holders throughout Auschwitz and the neighboring Birkenau camp, providing the necessary historical background in a roughly 90-minute tour.
There were busloads of visitors this Sunday (June 16) starting at the new visitors’ center, which seemed well-equipped and organized to handle large daily crowds in the thousands. The visitors’ center, a year-old, mostly concrete structure, is sparsely designed but well-thought-out as a waiting area to keep visitors moving. There seemed to be a bit of irony as we followed our somber guide, almost blindly, in military order to Auschwitz and then by bus to Birkenau. The place naturally has that kind of aura.
We visited a handful of the many buildings in a progression that seemed to heighten the senses to the scale of this horrific place. We started with an understanding of the scale of this project, which began in 1939 when the Nazis annexed the town of Oswiecim to create an industrial base with a work camp at Auschwitz, a former WWI Polish barracks. The success in exploiting and then murdering prisoners led to a huge expansion at nearby Birkenau and other smaller camps in the area. The camps held over 1.5 million prisoners, 1.1 million of whom were murdered. In just a few years, the Nazis had learned how to efficiently kill and plunder Jews (largest number by far), Poles, Russians, Gypsies, and others from all over Europe.
The tour, buildings, and grounds are preserved much as they would have been back then. Auschwitz does not look particularly threatening from the outside of the buildings until you learn what happened on the inside. The museum tour continues quickly through several buildings, each with a specific focus such as medical experimentation, extermination, proof of crime, interrogation, punishment, and cremation.
All this is explained and examined through the many glass-enclosed statements and artifacts. Surprisingly, the photos on display do not show the ravaged bodies of the starved and tortured, but rather pensive and scared individuals waiting for the worst to come. This is not a multimedia experience. We see and hear only the story, but by being in the actual place, we can more easily imagine what happened. Imagination here can be more powerful than simulation.
The final third of the tour was a short bus trip to Birkenau after touring Auschwitz. I was surprised by the larger scale of the Birkenau camp. Its 365 acres are wide open except for a dozen or so buildings and the ever-present electrified barbed wire fence. There is a dominant headquarters building and guardhouse with train tracks running right through it. The tracks and train end about a half-mile into the camp, where thousands of prisoners would end their final journey.
Auschwitz remains important as a reminder to all of us of man’s ability to do wrong, especially to each other. One can only imagine how anyone could be so cruel, although there is plenty of reason today to think that it could happen again. On the other hand, we know that people can change too. Germany and Japan today are positive examples. It’s worth a visit to Auschwitz at least once in your life to give that some serious consideration.
For this particular visit I chose to create one slide show video with pics we took while on the tour with the theme from Shindler’s List playing in the backgroud. While we were all lost for words, the pictures are memorable and speak much louder than words.
My Plan C 