My Pilgrimage to Auschwitz
Stories of injustice must always be told and retold. I recently read the book, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, and while going through the pages, all those places and events described in it played in front of me. I went to Auschwitz and Birkenau in December of 2016. It was nothing less than a pilgrimage for me. However, some experiences are such that you just absorb them and never really talk about them. In this case too, I rarely discuss my thoughts with anyone, not being sure whether the other person also feels about it the same way.
When I was in school, my class teacher one day, recommended two books and the title of one of them resonated so much with me that I picked it up the very next day — The Diary of Anne Frank. I was almost the same age as Anne Frank at that time, so probably that’s why the book made a huge impact on me. It was difficult for me to fathom why a young next-door-kind-of-a-girl’s life was cut short so brutally, reducing her girly dreams to dust. I read this book several times through my youth too, and so did all at home. I knew I had to pay my tribute to Anne Frank someday, by visiting the places which saw humanity murdered in cold blood by humanity itself. Anne Frank spent some time in Auschwitz too, before, she was transported to another camp Bergen Belsen in Germany. She died there.
Auschwitz is located in Poland, which is central Europe, hence quite easily accessible from most cities like Prague, Vienna, Budapest, to name a few. I flew to Krakow in Poland as I wanted to spend a couple of days there, Krakow having been a key location during the WWII.
Auschwitz (Oswiecim in Polish) is about 66 km from Krakow and it took me around an hour and a half to reach. I had booked an organized tour with a local tour operator. We were a small group of 5–6 people who had travelled from different parts of the world but were united in this journey to witness one of the biggest crimes against humanity.
Auschwitz was the deadliest concentration camp run by the Nazis during the Holocaust of World War II. The Auschwitz concentration camp consisted of three parts: Auschwitz I — the main camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau — a concentration & extermination camp and Auschwitz III-Monowitz which was a labour camp.
Auschwitz-I initially was a German detention centre for Polish political prisoners and German criminals which was later converted into a concentration camp to conduct mass exterminations. These criminals brought to the camp in 1940 later became the functionaries and established the camp’s foundation for sadism — where prisoners were beaten, tortured, and executed for the most trivial reasons. The first gassings here started in 1941.
Auschwitz II-Birkenau was constructed in 1942 as the number of prisoners grew exponentially.
Prisoners were brought to Auschwitz in freight trains (which usually carried cattle). Jews from all over Nazi-occupied Europe were rounded up from villages, towns and cities alike, and sent to this place. Other prisoners consisted of Poles, Roma Gypsies and Russians. Of the 1.3 million sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million died.
It was a cold December morning. As we walked through the main gate of of Auschwitz -I, which displayed the huge sign — Arbeit Macht Frei —German for Labour Sets You Free, I was already filled with a sense of foreboding. I had seen these words on the gates of Dachau Concentration Camp too in Munich earlier, so I knew what it meant.
We entered a very meticulously planned red-brick complex which consisted of different blocks. Each block had a number and name and these blocks lined both the sides of the compound. The entire periphery was secured with barbed wires which were electrified at that time. In the compound, were the assembly points — where the SS guards called out the roll-call twice a day, the wooden posts where hangings would take place, spots were punishments would get carried out — like suspending the prisoner on a hook for hours together or beatings in public. At strategic locations, there were watch towers where armed SS guards would keep a watch on the prisoners below. They would need slight or no provocation to shoot people down. Some would just fire for pure sadistic pleasure.
On arrival of a trainload of prisoners, all their belongings used to be confiscated, which meant their clothes, luggage, jewellery, food, cash and any other thing on them. Many carried bags and luggage with stuff they thought they might need, since they were never told where they were headed. Nobody had a clue that they were being sent to death, irrespective of their age, gender, stature or profession. At the entry itself, the prisoners would be examined and segregated — old, children, sick and weak would be sent directly to gas chambers while the young and healthy were enrolled for different kinds of labour and sent to the barracks. Heads shaved and in uniforms.
In fact, it was agonizing to see a room with a glass enclosure full of human hair — big beautiful locks of different hues. There were other rooms that were stacked with the prisoners’ personal belongings — luggage with the names of the owners’ neatly inscribed on them, hair brushes, shoes, utensils, accessories and what not. One cannot help wonder who these innocent people would’ve been and where would they have lived before, in happier times….
How innocently the men, women and children would undress and go for the so-called “shower” not knowing that they were headed for a painful death by poisonous gases which silently flew in through vents in the ceiling.
Those who were lucky to survive the gas chambers died later. The excruciating labour with barely any food, inadequate clothing and hygiene died of starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Some got killed during medical experiments.
The incidents and anecdotes narrated by our guide left us stunned. We could actually imagine the “ life in the day of an inmate”. They lived miserable lives in the camps, preferring death to torture. Inmates were beaten or shot for the most frivolous reasons. The sadistic pleasure that the Nazis derived can hardly be explained. Instances like this — early mornings when the prisoners got up, they were beaten by guards for getting late to the toilet. Toilets were very few and the prisoners were many more in number. The guards would give them just a few minutes on the toilet and since many would suffer from diarrhoea, they were humiliated and made to run at the risk of being shot. The cruelty and disrespect of the level endured by prisoners here is probably unheard of elsewhere.
We spent a couple of hours in Auschwitz and then left for Birkenau, which is about 4 km away.
Birkenau is huge. The expanse suggests what the magnitude of operations in this place would have been like. The place spelled nothing but gloom and hits you hard.
As we walked past, listening to our guide, we silently watched the horror-story being unfolded — the railway platform where the prisoners, after days together of travel, cold and starving, got off the train and were sorted at. We saw the work area, the freezing sleeping bunks, unhygienic toilets, the spine-chilling crematoriums.
The crematoriums were hurriedly destroyed by the SS before they started evacuating the camp at the end 1944, on knowing that the Soviet army was almost at the gates! You can still see the remains partly standing as a witness to the shameful holocaust. The massive grounds, which have the ashes of thousands of inmates mingled in them make Birkenau the largest graveyard in the world.
Soviet troops entered Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, a day now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In 1947 Poland founded the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on this site, and in 1979 it was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
By late afternoon we were ready to leave — physically, at least. The whole experience left all of us quiet and thinking. What we saw was not sinking in. An extremely sobering visit which choked my emotions and left me teary-eyed at the end of it. The heart was heavy and unable to understand that WHY was this allowed to happen.
