Auschwitz and Birkenau Death Camps from Tony Smith on Vimeo.
BEST VIEWED FULL SCREEN WITH VOLUME TURNED UP
We left our warm hotel in Krakow after breakfast and shared a taxi with an American high school English teacher from Chicago. The journey of 31 miles was uneventful. The first surprise was the town of Oswiecim, normal in every respect except that it is located right next to the camp. I just couldn’t imaging living that close to something that evil!
We entered Auschwitz 1 under the infamous arch and were greeted with the words “ARBEIT MACHT FREI”, (work sets you free). As I write this I am reminded that recently the sign was stolen during the night, fortunately the thieves were apprehended before it could be sold. It had been cut into 3 pieces. A replica has been erected pending the repair of the original.
As foreboding as Auschwitz 1 is with it’s fences and barbed wire, sentry towers and blocks of brick built prison buildings it did not prepare me for my visit to Auschwitz 2 – Birkenau.
Birkenau occupies a huge open space filled with row after row of mainly wooden cell blocks. In the centre is the marshaling yard where trains from throughout Nazi occupied Europe deposited their human cargo. On the tracks visitors had left bouquets of flowers, some fresh that day, some frozen and others dying. The main building, with the tower through which the trains passed, is now an observation room for visitors, a warm sanctuary. In my portfolio of images I have included some original photographs to help illustrate how it was at the time. There is not much of the gas chambers or cremation buildings to see – which rather surprised me. In one of the original cell blocks are chilling reminders of the past, items removed from the dead; human hair, spectacles, hair brushes, suitcases, prosthetic limbs – and alongside, a pile of empty Zyklon B gas cannisters.
At the Nuremberg Trials, held after World War 2 Rudolf Hoss, the first commander of Auschwitz, stated (perhaps proudly?) that 3 million Jews had been exterminated. Sometime later this number was revised to 1.1 million, which presumably excluded the Gypsies, political prisoners and others who did not “sign up” to Hitlers new world order.
Much is made by the Jews of their barbaric treatment at Auschwitz and other camps – and rightly so, but it saddens me that the extermination of the Gypsy (Roma) people is hardly ever mentioned. Records show that Roma men were imprisoned at Auschwitz a year or two prior to the arrival of the Jews. At the same time Nazis doctors were sterilising their women whom they considered “unworthy of human reproduction”. It would appear that anything up to 500,000 Roma died at Auchwitz and other camps and thousands more were displaced into Poland. The Nazi supporting Vichy Government of France deported 30,000 Roma to Nazi concentration camps for extermination.
I know this was all a long time ago and it couldn’t happen again – could it? Well, it has – in Cambodia (2.5 million), Bosnia (110,000), Rwanda (1 million) and Darfur (600,000), to name those that come quickly to mind. In Darfur it is still happening!
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
George Santana, Philosopher 1863 – 1952