Week Four: Auschwitz

I don't really know how to express the things that I saw this weekend at Auschwitz, but I will give it my best attempt.  When I first started thinking about going on this trip to Europe I saw that one of the places we would be going was to Auschwitz. It was a place that I had always heard about but somewhere that I never thought I would go to.

Saturday was a cold, rainy, and gloomy day, which was only fitting for being at Auschwitz.  The first thing we saw was the infamous gate that reads "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" which translates from German to "work makes you free."  One thing that I was unaware of before this trip was the lie that the Nazis were telling the Jewish people to keep them controlled.  The Jewish people thought they were just being relocated to all Jewish settlements and many of them thought they would be better off there than back home, where they weren't welcomed by their neighbors.  They were under the impression that if they went to these settlements and worked hard, they could make a better life for themselves.


Gate that reads ARBEIT MACHT FREI

Over one million people, mostly Jewish people but also Pols, Gypsies, and Soviet Prisoners of War were brought here and killed.  When getting off the train, Nazi members would decide if the people were to become slaves or if they would right into the "showers" to get disinfected.  This is what they told the people so they would cooperate.  Once they got to the showers, up to 2,000 people would be shoved inside and Nazis would dump Zyklon B, which would cause everyone inside to suffocate and die.


Zyklon B, the chemical used in gas chambers

When the Ally armies were closing in on the Nazis at the end of the war, they decided to blow up the gas chambers as a way to get rid of the evidence that the Holocaust ever happened.  Out of all of the gas chambers that used to be there, only one small one is still there today. We went inside of it and you could still see the fingernail marks on the walls where people tried escaping when the gas was poured in.  They also had re-made the furnaces that were used to get rid of the bodies.

Scratch marks on the wall

One form of intimidation that the Nazis used to control prisoners was the "Death Wall."  They would line people up there and shoot them, sometimes they would even make people watch.  The Nazis would make the people strip naked and walk out to the courtyard to meet their fate.  Over 3,500 people were shot and killed standing against this wall.  The building to the left of the Death Wall (see picture below) has black boxes over all of the windows, because that building was used by German doctors to conduct experiments on prisoners.


The Death Wall

Although I am glad that I went to Auschwitz, it is a place that I never want to go back to.  You get an eery feeling right when you step inside the first gate.  Since words can't describe what happened there, I will just show pictures of the rest of the camp instead of describing it.




















The only standing gas chamber







Train car that held more than 100 people for multiple days