Auschwitz and Birkenau Picture Tour

I am attending the UNFCCC in Warsaw. As it is a 2 week long meeting, the weekend between is an opportunity to do sightseeing. I took a train to Krakow last weekend and Auschwitz is a bus ride from there. I've been to the Holocaust museums in Jerusalem and Washington, DC, but this museum surpassed both. It was a tragic reminder of our past. We must never let this history be repeated.

Inside the extermination camp looking out. Surrounded by electrified barbed wire.

Inside Auschwitz, the Birkenau extermination camp is at the tree line you see ahead.

As many as 100 Jews, along with whatever belongings they could carry, were crammed into train cars that typically hold only about 12 cattle. This car was donated by a Jewish family who learned from an eye witness years later that their father was beaten to death by Nazis because he refused to give up his prayer shawl. A Jewish prayer shawl is sealed inside this train car.

“Work Makes Freedom” mockery used by the Nazis to deceive the Jews and keep them from rebelling as they entered Auschwitz.

Barbed wire surrounds dozens of barracks that had no indoor plumbing.

The collapsed building contained an underground room where Jews were told to disrobe and sort their clothes. They then entered a room with shower heads on the ceilings thinking they were finally going to freshen up after their grueling train trip.

Poison gas was dispensed through this hole in the ceiling of the shower room.

From the statement of Hans Stark, registrar of new arrivals, Auschwitz: “At another, later gassing -- also in autumn 1941 -- Grabner* ordered me to pour Zyklon B into the opening because only one medical orderly had shown up. During a gassing Zyklon B had to be poured through both openings of the gas-chamber room at the same time. This gassing was also a transport of 200-250 Jews, once again men, women and children. As the Zyklon B -- as already mentioned -- was in granular form, it trickled down over the people as it was being poured in.

They then started to cry out terribly for they now knew what was happening to them. I did not look through the opening because it had to be closed as soon as the Zyklon B had been poured in. After a few minutes there was silence. After some time had passed, it may have been ten to fifteen minutes, the gas chamber was opened. The dead lay higgledy-piggedly all over the place. It was a dreadful sight.”

Human ovens. Note the soot still clinging to the ceiling.

Inmate housing for the few who weren’t taken immediately to the gas chambers, only one way in and no indoor plumbing. Women lived only about 3 months and men only about 6 months, perishing of starvation, disease and other forms of human cruelty.

Nine persons per layer on top of flea and rodent infested straw. The bottom was worst because of the cold and the biting rats, as well as the urine that flowed from the two upper bunks.

Poland was the European gathering place for extermination. The first victims were Poles and gypsies, then the Jews who were safe until the Nazi invasion.

Ninety percent, 1,100,000 Jews, were ruthlessly slaughtered in Auschwitz.

Those who attempted to escape, less than 1000, were either hanged or shot facing this wall--situated outside the barracks housing the medical experiment victims.