Hi Everyone,
In the past my posts have been about happy, memorable moments built around trips to a new country! However, in this post I would like to focus on a topic a little heavier... Memorable, yes. Happy, not so much. When my fiancé and I first decided on travelling to Poland, we hadn’t intended on visiting the camps. When I told friends we were headed to the camps, I remember them shaking their heads saying, “why would you want to see something so horrible?!” Good point. Why? Because I think it is so important for the past to be remembered, for what happened to be called what it truly was: murder. It is important for us to remember, so that nothing like this EVER happens again. If you are interested in learning about my experience in Auschwitz, please keep reading.
Auschwitz, also called Auschwitz-Birkenau, was the largest concentration and extermination camp set up by Nazi Germany. It was located near the industrial town of Oswiecim in southern Poland in a portion of the country that was annexed by Germany in World War II. It is important to mention that when talking about Auschwitz, there are two camps under the same name. The Nazi’s created a second camp when they needed more room to hold the prisoners. Terrible, Terrible. But that’s how it was.
When my fiancé and I initially jumped onto the train headed for the second camp (the largest of the two), I felt sad... So very sad. I remember sitting there overwhelmed with the realization that this very train would have been similar to the one carrying all of those prisoners against their will, headed in the same direction I was. Once reaching the gates, the prisoners would face severe torture, and eventually death, where as I was deliberately choosing to travel to the camp, years later, for the memorial of it all. It didn’t seem fair, nor did it seem right. It was overwhelming that I had a choice to here, and they didn’t. Once I entered the memorial grounds, my heart dropped. My stomach felt like it would implode. I felt sick. Sick physically, and emotionally. This was to be expected, I suppose, and of course I had anticipated sadness, but this sick feeling I got was a shock to me. I never knew my heart could throb that much. Lesson learned: You can not anticipate how you will feel visiting Auschwitz until you are standing in the very same spot where a number of people were excecuted.
Now, I would like to share with you some photos I took from inside the second camp. Then I will go on to share a few photographs from the first camp (the smallest of the two). Please remember that this is for informative purposes only:
Although there were tours taking place while I was visiting Auschwitz, I didn’t hop on with one. However, I did listen to what was being said when I was in ear range. And what I learnt was this:
The extermination procedure in the gas chambers were not told to the prisoners before hand. In fact, they were told that they were being sent to the camp, but that first they had to undergo disinfection and bathe. As you can see, the prisoners had no idea what awaited them. After the victims undressed, they were taken into the gas chamber, locked in, and murdered with Zyklon B gas. After they were killed, Sonderkommando prisoners dragged the bodies out of the gas chambers. They cut off the women’s hair and removed all metal dental work and jewelry. Then they burned the corpses in pits, on pyres, or in the crematorium furnaces. Bones that did not burn completely were ground to powder with pestles and then dumped, along with the ashes, in the rivers Sola and Vistula, and in nearby ponds.
I did not capture any photos of the gas chambers, as they were destroyed during World War II due to bombing by the allies.
Below are pictures I took from the first concentration camp. The first image is the entrance into the camp:
It is with great sadness that I share this post with you today, but with the hopes that this will be passed along to those who are uninformed of this tragedy. Again, I want to stress the importance of learning about the world’s history, and the wrongs we as humans have done to each other. Let us not ever repeat our actions. Let us learn from the past.
Thank you for reading, and if you did make it all the way to the end, I am proud of you for hanging in there! Your comments are really important to me, so if you did learn something today, please let me know in the comment section down below. I did my best to make my post as accurate as possible. After all, I am going off of memory! If there is anything you noticed to be falsely stated, I appologize and ask that you let me know!
Thanks again and Best wishes,
Stephanie