Auschwitz and Birkenau Memorial Museum, Poland

Auschwitz and Birkenau Memorial Museum


We left our hotel at 7:45 by private minibus to visit the German concentration camps on the way to Krakow in Poland. We were over the border in less than an hour and then stopped to change money and get some Polish zlotys.

The entrance to Auschwitz

What to say about Auschwitz and Birkenau? Well to start they were the largest concentration camps set up by the Nazis and a place where over 1 million people, mostly Jews were exterminated by Hitler’s soldiers. They are at the center of the Holocaust. When you walk around there you feel their spirit and their pain as you see the evidence of mass murders. It is almost too much to take in that this could happen in recent history and humans could do this to their fellow humans.

Row upon row of barracks for prisoners

This barracks overlooked the inner courtyard where executions took place so the Nazis covered up the windows so no one could see what was going on

The memorial wall on the sight where many were shot

Auschwitz was the first camp set up and even though that seemed big the Germans wanted to be more efficient so built a much larger camp about 3 kms away and that was Birkenau. This complex was enormous and it was where they built the crematoriums or mass ovens so they could burn the bodies at a faster rate.

The remains of the crematorium that the Nazis burned before the camp was liberated.You can still see all the bararcks in the background.

The first camp opened in 1940 and then kept expanding as more and more people were transported by rail cars from all over Europe to die at this place. The majority of Jews deported to Auschwitz- men, women and children were sent directly to their deaths in the Birkenau gas chambers.

The barbed wire fence and one of the guard towers

The rail road tracks that brought the Jews into Birkenau

One of the rail cars

The bunks the prisoners slept on six to a bunk,many died there.

We saw where the rail cars dropped them, where they were sorted, shaved and then walked to the death chambers a short distance away. We also saw huge piles of personal belongings that were collected from them before they died shoes, brushes, combs, suitcases. Though the most terrifying for me was the huge and I mean huge masses of human hair that was being stored to be used in factories in Germany to make felt and other material for the uniforms of the German soldiers. It brought many of us to tears as we tried to grasp the enormity of the killing machine.

Piles of glasses collected off the prisoners

Piles of shoes left behind

Their suitcases with names and addresses still on them

To see the faces of these people lining the walls, to see the barracks they were forced to live in and how brutally they were treated and starved to death takes your breath away with horror. I will never forget what I saw today and hope I never will. The Death wall, the gallows, the cells, the horrible living conditions will stay with me forever, but most of all the faces of the children, their clothes and toys that remained after the Liberation in January 1945. To think that all these people were exterminated because of the twisted mind of one man and his ability to bring his own people to the place where they committed these atrocities is unbelievable, but as we saw today so very, very real.

Some of the women in Auschwitz

And men...

And the sad fact is that millons of these people were exterminated before the war ended.