Joe’s May 2008 Trek Thru Israel, Eastern Europe & The Balkans En Route to Auschwitz Along the Same Rail Transport Lines my Ancestors Rode to the Death Camps

 One hour bus trip from Krakow to the Auschwitz and Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camps.  These camps were located in an industrial area of Northern Poland which had existing rail access.  Auschwitz is drarfed in size as compared to Birkenau nearby which was established by the Germans after Auschwitz to be a larger mass production killing machine.  The tours through camps are rather grim and an incredible message about just h0w low human beings can stoop to create a killing machine in the name of racial purity.  I really have so much to say about how moving this place is.  At the same timel, I am having writer’s block as I don’t know what to say about such a terrible place where so many many people were humiliated, deprived of the most basic sustenance as part of any overall strategy to break people and take away all hope before they butchered these people for no reason other than their religion.   Auschwitz Birkenau may have been the largest extermination camps, but they were only two of so many camps that the Nazis set up for the extermination of 6 million jews and many other people including gypsy, Poles, Russians and others who were non Jews.

The crematoriums were all destroyed by the Nazi guards when they knew they lost the war with the allied forces approaching the camps to liberate the remaining prisoners.  The ruins of the cremation buildings have been preserved as a memorial to the millions killed.  The rail spurs have also been preserved where the prisoners arrived for sorting out of the elderly and weak who were immediately sent to their deaths while the others were processed with their heads shaved, possessions confiscated and tatooed with identify numbers.  They were placed in barracks, of which many are still standing and others have been reconstructed.  The place is immense.  There is also a museum on site which is very sobering.  I have attached a picture from a room that was nothing but suitcases.  Other rooms had nothing but spectacles, or prosthesis, or hair from shaving prisoners, or hairbrushes, or shoe polish tins, even bowls removed from the luggage.  These were immense rooms that comprised the German collections of what they planned to amass as part of their museum commerating an extinct people.

Our group left at the end of the day emotionally drained and the mood of the group was markedly different.  We went to the train station in Krakow for a four hour train trip to Warsaw where we stayed for the next two nights. 

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.