Europe winging it

Dear readers we depart from our regularly scheduled travel blog of fun and light heartedness and instead, take a slight detour through some very important history of Europe. Now most of you reading this I’m sure are aware of the Holocaust and if you’re not, well that’s simply embarrassing for you. You may as well be American with that level of historical knowledge. Some of you will have even visited this unbelievable place (Rowan), so please bare with me as I try to inelegantly explain my experience here, as this place and the events of the “Jewish question” was quite hard to wrap my head around. In order to explain my experience here there will be a mini history lesson trying and inevitably failing to explain the scope of “the Jewish question” in a digestible and understandable context.

The day started off with a nice sleep in of a 5:50am pickup from my hotel room, and a 1.5hr shuttle bus ride to Auschwitz. I was quite pleased with how easy the tour was to organise as I referred to in my krakow post but everything here is very cheap it was only €60 for a full tour of Auschwitz and Birkenau including door to door hotel transport. On the way we watched a 1hr doco on Auschwitz including some slight backstory but what I found more impactful was red army footage of Auschwitz liberation which helped me to really link the modern day museum with the atrocities committed.

The tour guide had a microphone and we were given headsets which was very handy as I could dawdle at the back and still hear what she was saying. I’ll skip most of the actual tour so we can hear my very important digest but I felt the tour was quite rushed. We were only allowed to walk around with the guide and we barely spent 40seconds on any one thing. She’d just drop bombs like “this is 40,000 pairs of shoes and you can see a kids shoe” and then onto the next spot or building. I would’ve preferred to have been able to wonder around and really appreciate small details such contemplating and appreciating that each one of those pairs of shoes belonged to someone with a history and backstory, workers boots, academics shoes, a little girls cute shoes etc. But nooooo, we had places to be apparently, and as such while I can appreciate the Auschwitz museum - after the fact whilst I’ve had a bit of time to digest. I did feel that the whole experience was quite neutered. It also didn’t help that it was a 35deg day with extremely pretty, vibrant colours everywhere. I sent a photo of the Auschwitz entrance to the family group chat and my competitor/little sister “Lucinda” remarked how pretty the scenery was until she noticed the infamous “Arbiet macht frei” (work sets you free) sign. Not the same as the cold freezing\starving to death place I had come to expect from documentary footage.

We then hopped on our shuttle bus and had a 5min transfer to Birkenau. It is important to note the difference in function between Birkenau and Auschwitz when touring the two. Auschwitz 1 was a labour camp designed to get slave labour out of its inhabitants, Birkenau or its proper name “Auschwitz II-Birkenau” was a death camp where Jews would either be immediately executed or worked to death, or worked to near death then when unable to perform their duties, they were then executed.

The Birkenau tour was much better as I was given a lot more free roam, upon seeing the infamous gatehouse with the railway line through the middle I stopped and took it in. This place actually looked like the photos, pure death camp. I stood looking at the gatehouse for a couple of minutes contemplating just how serious what had occurred here was. All the final goodbyes of families, unknowing Jews, Romanians, homosexuals, and polish people who had entered this gatehouse and not known that they would never again see the outside world as a free human, not know the feeling of a full meal or certainty over their future. These harrowing thoughts filling my brain as I ventured further into the camp to then be standing on the loading dock of the train. The size of the camp was far greater than Auschwitz, I actually logged the walk on my Garmin and it was 3km to the end of the main causeway and back. I then saw the ruins for the crematoriums and gas chambers which the nazis had blown up before they evacuated the camp before the red army advanced. Apparently this was to hide evidence of their atrocity. I could see the underground entrances where Jews were first undressed and told to remember their ID numbers so they could get their stuff back after their “shower.” The remnant of the second chamber where 2000 people at a time could be put to death in 20 minutes. They had 4 of these chambers in Birkenau. They were pretty ruined so i had to use my imagination a bit to picture them.

However on the way out there was numerous barracks we toured all with beds mostly untouched. This is definitely an experience as I vividly remember seeing footage of rescued Jews in these exact style of beds, 6 starving corpses of humans crammed into each level. With the sickest people on the bottom level as they didn’t have the strength to climb onto other levels. Knowing and having seen footage of people so sick they would literally die in these bunks, and touching, seeing and smelling them was a very morbid experience. The smell was so unique it was a weird mixture of cattle manure and dead possum, a very filthy and deathly smell but not in the same way a decomposing body smells. I imagine it’s leftover from the conditions they were forced to live in with no access to toilets or ability to wash themselves. It’s a very unique smell to Birkenau that I don’t think I’ll forget (Of course could all be placebo who knows).

Overall the Birkenau tour was much greater and really showed the scale of what was being done by the Nazis better than Auschwitz. Still, the scale of “the final solution” with their 40,000 concentration camps is still quite a handful to process.

Now onto my history lesson and the real thoughts of Birkenau. Attached in the photos you will see the loading dock at Birkenau being used in 1944 taken by a smug SS soldier, in another photo you will see the prisoners being sorted by the SS doctor who with a simple uncaring wave of his hand had the ability to choose life or death for these people. The Dr would assess if you were fit enough for work, and if you were, you lived and if you weren’t, you were sent to the gas chamber that same day. The criteria for not being fit enough for work was, a pregnant lady, old people, young kids, young girls, sick looking people. The Dr did this by simply looking you up and down. Knowing this before I came and standing in this same spot that these events had occurred some 80 years ago was surreal. Imagining this smelly train arriving filled with about 10,000 people and they would arrived after having been crammed into a goods railway cart of a journey of 7-9 days having not been allowed to eat or go to the toilet. They were just relieved the journey was over. All to be suffocated to death. In the supposed name of racial hygiene, eugenics, and antisemitism. As I walked around Birkenau, near the fences, on the pathways I found myself wondering, how many dead bodies had been on this spot I was standing. How many Jews had flung themselves into this electric fence to end it all? They were so hungry and mentally broken. The infrastructure just symbolised death and hopelessness, I know if I was in that situation I wouldn’t have lasted long.

The Auschwitz prototype gas chamber (video attached) which operated until 1942 until gassing was moved to Birkenau. Able to kill 700 at once and was responsible for the death of tens of thousands, so many people they had to use open pits to burn the bodies with the ash remains still visible. This was converted to an air raid shelter for the SS, the fact that these men were able to convert and use this area knowing what had took place, with such indifference is quite frankly undigestible to me. For example old mate Himmler witnessed these gassing like a science experiment in 1941, and not liking the numbers ordered Birkenau built.

What really shone through during the tour was the absolute indifference and sub human treatment that the SS treated the prisoners with, often killing prisoners because they could or for fun. One of the attached photos shows a small guard room for one SS guard to perform roll call for the entire Auschwitz camp. This hut was there so if it was raining or cold the guard could retreat into warm while all the prisoners had to stand outside. This is a small example of how conditions of living weren’t even a second thought for the prisoners they weren’t even a thought. No latrines or washing areas in 90% of the barracks, with prisoners being able to use the toilet twice a day. Many prisoners suffering from diarrhoea due to starvation etc. would soil themselves in the line. The tour guide told us once during roll call one single prisoner was unaccounted for, and the SS made all the prisoners stand at attention for 19hrs as punishment in negative 27 degree weather with 10 or so people dying due to hypothermia. What’s even more crazy about this is guess how many SS guards were around to make this happen… one single guard. The prisoners were so mentally broken, tired and exhausted, with the SS creating such a good systems with the “kapos,” who were prisoners assigned to oversee other prisoners in exchange for special privileges. That the SS didn’t even need to police this punishment, their lapdog kapos would. Who were so fearful of becoming a proper prisoner that they pitted themselves against fellow prisoners in order to maintain favour. I listened to the most heartbreaking podcast of a teenage girl survivor of Auschwitz a while back and she described the kapos as even worse than the SS.

Auschwitz Birkenau personally saw 1,300,000 people exterminated there. Of the 11 million Jews in Europe the holocaust wiped out approximately 5/6 million. These are figures everyone has heard. However, coming from Australia, nice and removed from all this and with my own eyes touring Germany, Netherlands and Poland. Places that had been directly impacted and seeing the effects to this day. With the Jewish populations in these countries effectively having been wiped off the map, really put into perspective just how absolutely massive the scale of what the Nazis did, and how many people it had affected. There were multiple people I spoke to in each city I visited, that had effectively had one side of there entire family wiped out. Or a grandfather who was adopted and out of their whole family, they were the 1 out of 40 who survived.

I think it’s definitely a good thing I visited Poland after visiting Germany otherwise I’m pretty sure some form of indirect hatred towards any nationalistic Germans might’ve shone through.Read more