When we entered Auschwitz 1 early on Friday morning, many of us were taken aback at the crowds and frenetic busyness of the place. We remembered the somber sacred quietude of Treblinka and this cacophony almost felt wrong. Yet it reminded me of the fact that when the prisoners were brought here from 1940-1944, it was not quiet. It was not kind or friendly. It was a place of frenetic noise, confusion, fear, and finality.
This is how we began our time at Auschwitz. We stood in lines and entered a memorial site as one of very many. Auschwitz today has over 2 million visitors a year who come to bear witness, remember, learn, and honor the victims. Today we did the same. Our tour was an experience of the senses. We saw visual images and artifacts of the people whose lives were destroyed and walked the buildings and locations of their experience.
The very first location on the tour was the main gate “albreit macht frei” which told the prisoners that work would bring freedom. For so many of them, it did not. We visited one of the many barracks which, unlike the images we see in movies, were instead solid two-story brick buildings because they were built for the Polish army before the war. While the conditions and overcrowding were horrific to contemplate, the most haunting part of this exhibit were the photos. Photos lined the wall in a never ceasing line documenting each prisoner brought into the camp and their date of death. Most prisoners only lived an average of 3 months. Yet there are only 40,000 photos in existence because the majority of prisoners were killed immediately and neither photographed nor recorded in any way. Their trace of existence is a shadow, only to be seen in an old photograph or as a marking on a suitcase.
We were reminded that this camp was begun for Polish prisoners, Russian POWs, and eventually Jews and Roma. Out of 1.3 million Jews deported to all the camps at Auschwitz, 1.1 million lost their lives, but also 150,000 non-Jews, 23,000 Roma, 15,000 Russian POWs and 4,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses. People were killed through starvation, shootings, hanging, torture, as well as gassing. We saw the living conditions as well as the selection procedures designed for killing.
One of the most powerful exhibits was set up to show the transition of Jewish life from before 1939, to the realities of the camping, then death. The first room you entered showed movie images of ordinary life before the Holocaust. As you transitioned through the museum, you heard the Nazi propaganda which began the horror and then through image and word saw the transition to the realities of the Holocaust. One of the most significant rooms was full of drawings completed by children in the camp. It showed ordinary pictures children would draw as well as images of the horrors they had witnessed in the camp. The last room in this exhibit was a book. A book of 4 million names. Millions of others are lost to time. We were able to physically search the book for our own surnames and many in the group found family in the pages of this macabre census.
Another building was filled with the artifacts of the people who were brought to the camps. These are just the items not destroyed by the Nazis before they left the camp in January 1945. Rooms that are filled with shoes, children’s shoes, cooking pots, hairbrushes, the items of life that people felt compelled to bring with them as they were forced from their homes and residences. There was also a room of human hair, 2 tons of it, which equates to 40,000 people, the size of a small city.
The final stop on the tour was the gas chambers. This chamber was in operation until 1943, before Birkenau became the main killing center. As we walked through the gas chamber and crematorium in silence, a heavy sadness and suffocating memory overtook us. It felt so oppressive and hard to breathe and we were reminded that as we were relieved when we could reemerge out into the fresh air and sun that we were lucky to be able to live in a time when we don’t face a different circumstance. The people who entered that chamber 70+ years ago were never able leave it again. They never breathed fresh air again and were murdered in innocence because of hate, ignorance, and evil.
In the afternoon we had the privilege and honor of walking through Birkenau with Howard Chandler. Birkenau was set up in 1941 to handle the extensive numbers of individuals who were being brought into the camp. It would eventually have 4 gas chambers in this section of the camp. We walked past the iconic location seen in many images of the gates the trains passed through and journeyed to one of the remaining barracks. We sat in the barrack and Howard Chandler related to us the story of his time at the camp. He talked about the ever-present experience of death. How people related that the only way out was up the chimneys. He said that if you did not have hope, you died. And that because he had hope that he might find his father and brother again, he kept going. He described how, as a 15-year-old, he was able to learn how to get extra food or items for trade in order to try to stay alive. He was lucky enough to have a few friends that helped one another to make it until the camp was abandoned. After leaving Birkenau in January 1944, he was forcibly marched towards Germany and eventually wound up in Czechoslovakia with Russian POWs before being liberated.
We also had the privilege of hearing the testimony of Murray Ebner as eloquently read to us along the train tracks by Janet Monseur-Durr. It reminded us that this was a vast human tragedy of so many individuals who lives were unalterably affected by the events and prejudices that rose to the surface during the 1930s and 1940s.
We all felt deeply moved and honored to hear Howard Chandler’s testimony in this overwhelming place; in that ‘factory of death’ that this remarkable man had survived.
We then followed the train tracks through the interior of the camp. We walked past the fields that contained the remains of chimney stacks lined up in endless rows standing as grave monuments over this vast cemetery, sentinels to the horrific destruction. At the end of the line was a memorial and the remains of two of the crematoria. In this location we were able to hold a memorial service and honor the victims. Then, finally to end our time at Birkenau, we traveled to the bath house and had to walk through a lovely grove of birch trees (which is where the name Birkenau comes from). The birds were chirping and yet we were walking through the valley of death with the crematoria enveloping us. In the bath house we saw the procedures that the prisoners underwent before entering the camp as workers, and again in the final exhibit, we saw the images and photographs of life before the war. Images that could be our own — our own families, our own story — had we been born in a different time.
After leaving Auschwitz, we traveled back through the idyllic countryside to Krakow. We spent some time in much needed reflection and then had a lovely Shabbat dinner. The culmination of this powerful day included a talk by Uwe and Gabi Seltmann. They told us about their journey towards discovering the past and healing from it. Uwe is from Germany and through his research discovered that his grandfather was in the SS, and Gabi has Jewish roots. They have worked together through their own marriage and with research and discourse to help heal the painful memory of the past and move forward to the future with love.
Howard Chandler reminded us during our precious time with him that “you cannot bring back what was but can improve what is.”
Deb Kruger is an instructor at Butler County Community College.