The recent visit of Pope Francis in July to Aushwitz-Birkeneau concentration camp in southern Poland reminds me of an unforgettable visit I made there last year. I arrived at the front gate of Auschwitz with the familiar sign above the gates, ‘Arbeit macht frei’, meaning ‘Work makes you Free’.
Everywhere was quiet –except for the sound of shoes shuffling on the gravel. The young guide began by explaining a bit about the background history, how Auschwitz was opened as a Concentration camp or as she called it an Extermination camp by Adolf Hitler in June 1940 to imprison Jewish and Polish people who were opposed to his takeover of Poland the previous year. They pretended it was a work camp. ( I discovered since that it was the British who invented the idea of a Concentration camp during the Boer war.)
Auschwitz was one of ten concentration camps opened by Hitler and Himmler to hold opponents before they were executed. It was built on an old army site in a rather out of the way place quite near the IG Farben factory which produced rubber for the war effort. It is not known for sure if the proximity of this factory was one of the reasons for building the concentration camp seven kilometres away.
‘On 14 June 1940 Auschwitz went into operation as a quarantine or transit camp. Most of the prisoners were brought here on trains. When they arrived they were stripped of all their belongings. Their shoes were collected. The women’s hair was cut and stored. Gold fillings were taken out of their teeth. Their spectacles were all gathered up to be sold on. German scientists, sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazis, had invented a new and effective gas which killed instantly. Those unfit to work were the first to be killed. Those disabled or sick were next to be killed. It is estimated that five thousand (5000) men, women and children were killed each week. It was when I saw the belongings of the prisoners stacked up on display behind glass windows-8000 pairs of shoes, huge amounts of women’s hair, crutches, clothes, toys, false teeth, spectacles, that I began to realise the horror and brutality of this place.
The red brick houses were built in an orderly fashion. The prisoners were crowded into the small living quarters. Toilets were available at certain times in large common toilets which were totally inadequate for the numbers. Prisoners lay on the floor on makeshift mattresses. There was no water and no food. The people imprisoned there could not survive for very long.
The guided tour of the camp lasted almost 3 hours which was almost as much as I could take. It was sickening to see reminders of the horror and to imagine what it was like for those thousands of poor suffering children, women and men, the pain and the anguish of families and loved ones who were brought here to be put to death.
Birkeneau is an extension of Auschwitz, a few kilometres away. It is a huge enclosure with many wooden huts that housed the prisoners. Hitler wanted a camp to hold up to 100,000 at any given time. He had a lot of killing on his mind in the early 1940s before he and his army were defeated. I left that terrible place troubled by what I had seen. This was evil and inhumanity on a grand scale.
They say that the birds don’t sing in Auschwitz, that they avoid this desolate place where more than a million human beings were tortured and put to death on the orders of a megalomaniac and a few of his henchmen. It is a stark reminder of how power corrupts. This place is still haunted by the ghosts of men, women and children, Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Homosexuals and priests –all of whom were humiliated and killed, because they were regarded as ‘enemies of the State’ and somehow less than human. The birds never sing in Auschwitz in remembrance of those who were killed by those soldiers ‘carrying out orders’; only doing their duty, as soldiers always do.
The pinnacle of mans inhumanity to man. You’d think that Israel would remember and learn.
By the way…Jude is a girl’s name – just sayin’ LOL:)
“You’d think that Israel would remember and learn.”
That’s exactly what they do.
“( I discovered since that it was the British who invented the idea of a Concentration camp during the Boer war.)”
Wrong. It was actually the Confederates during the American Civil War who invented the concentration camp – have you not heard of Andersonville or seen the early photos of its emaciated survivors?
Secondly, Auschwitz was a DEATH camp and the above attempts to link it to the state of Israel is a shameful attempt at far-right holocaust revisionism as it has ZERO to do with that as Israel was not even a country before then.
Perhaps you Brits are just sore because they defeated you during the war of independence? *Yup Brits and Irish same thing really – Irish are just pretend Brits;) Don’t like someone coming to that conclusion then STOP conflating Israeli with Jewish.
Ps. FYI Irish Jews died in Nazi death camps too.
And to think some still think his evil plan was all a lie. More people should see Auschwitz and Birkeneau.
Mike, perhaps more people should reflect on the evil plan that is Syria Today.
The war in Syria has much to do with gas and oil.
A Saudi-US deal on Syria and the so-called ISIS involves oil and gas control of the entire region and the weakening of Russia and Iran by Saudi Arabia flooding the world market with cheap oil while many starve in Africa.