Poland - Auschwitz

My Thursday classes were canceled, so we had a few days and we decided to take a trip to Poland. Warsaw is a little far, but Krakow was manageable (though it was still 8 hours on the train).
Picture 1: The gate at Auschwitz
Picture 2: The double barbed-wire, electrified fence at Auschwitz.
Picture 3: A room with shoes from the victims. **You were not allowed to take photos inside any of the buildings at Auschwitz, so this is just a photo I found on the Internet.
Picture 4: The death gate at Birkenau.

We left Wednesday morning and arrived in Krakow in the early evening. We were staying at a small backpackers' hostel. It was our first hostel experience. We were in a large room with 5 bunk beds. The medal beds made a loud creaking noise if you so much as breathed too deeply, let alone move. You can imagine what it was like with 10 people coming and going at all hours of the day. Neither of us slept well the first night, but after that we were fine. The hostel was clean and walking distance to the train/bus station and the center of town, so overall it was a fine place for us to stay.
On Thursday morning we got up and boarded the bus to Auschwitz. It was about an hour and a half from Krakow. One of the first things you see at Krakow is the gate with the sign "Arbeit macht frei" which is German for "work brings freedom" -- a cruel irony since quite a few of the people kept at Auschwitz died from exhaustion from working too hard.
The grounds at Auschwitz have these large brick "blocks" where the prisoners were kept. Today, the grounds seems almost peaceful -- between the grass and the trees it looks inviting. If you didn't know where you were, you'd think it was quite a pleasant place in the countryside. The peacefulness on the day we were there made it hard to imagine that such horrible things had occurred there not too long ago.
Several of the blocks have been converted into a museum with exhibits about the building of the camp, how things at the camp work, where the prisoners came from, how they got to the camp, what life at the camp was like, etc.
Some of the hardest blocks for me to visit were the ones that had displays of items taken from the prisoners when they arrived at the camp. These displays included rooms of shoes, luggage, clothing, baby items, shaving brushes. There was another room that was full of human hair -- they shaved every person upon their arrival. Apparently the Nazis extracted everything they could from the people to reuse the goods/material elsewhere. To me this was a demonstration of how they didn't treat the victims as people but objects, and I found it upsetting.
We also visited the notorious block 11. This was the so-called prison within the prison, where people were sent when they'd broken the rules. This building included starvation cells, standing cells (a one meter by one meter room where 4 people were force to stand all night, in addition to their manual labor during the day -- many people died of exhaustion), dark cells (rooms with only one small opening where many people were forced and subsequently most suffocated), and rooms where the Nazis performed the first tests with Zyklon B (the poisonous gas). We were able to tour all of these rooms and it was a cold and solemn experience that makes me shudder even now when I think about it.
Across the grounds at Auschwitz there's a building that was the first gas chamber used by the Nazis. The bunker was a medium-sized room that our guide said the Nazis would squeeze 800 people into. It was with great trepidation that I walked into this building. It was hard to think about the horrible things that happened inside. It made my stomach turn. It was tough, too, to walk into the crematorium in the next room. Even being there it was impossible to fathom what actually happened.
After we finished touring Auschwitz, we got on a bus that took us 3 km to Birkenau (also known as Auschwitz 2, but also commonly just referred to as Auschwitz). Whereas Auschwitz 1 was mainly a concentration camp where prisoners were kept, Birkenau was the site of the exterminations -- as our guide said, the people didn't even have the chance to become prisoners.
As you approach Birkenau, you see the iconic brick building known as the "death gate." The railroad during that time went right under the tower and into the camp. On the side of the tracks there's an 800m platform where the people were unloaded. Our guide said that within moments of getting off a train a Nazi official made a decision about the fate of each person. Those people deemed fit for manual labor were sent to the camp and nearly everyone else (women, children, elderly) were sent immediately to the gas chamber.
We walked down the entire length of the platform to the remains of the gas chambers and crematoriums. The Nazis blew up the buildings in the final days before the Soviets liberated the camp to try to destroy the evidence of what had occurred. Here, too, it was impossible to comprehend what had occurred.
It was a very solemn trip, but I am glad that we went.
We'll have more about our Poland trip in the next post, and all of our pictures from the trip are on the picassa site.