Arbeit Macht Frei

The next morning we all piled out of bed around 8 in the morning, enjoyed another breakfast at the hotel, piled into the tour bus and headed out into the country to pay a visit to Auschwitz, one of the most notorious and famous of the hundreds of German Concentration Camps.

All that we're taught in school is that the Nazis had a bunch of concentration camps where they killed Jews, but that is a bit of a simplification. There were three categories of camps: work camps, concentration camps, and death camps. Everybody was (obviously) forced into slave labor at the work camps, but concentration camps were distinguished from death camps in that the purpose of a concentration camp was punishment rather than murder. This is one of the reasons that Auschwitz is so famous. Not only was it the biggest camp ever built, but it left actual survivors.

In other words, the only reason that we hear so much about Auschwitz is because the REAL death camps had 100% mortality rates.

Which is no belittlement of Auschwitz by any means. The living conditions were nothing short of terrifying. In one little Lager, which were often converted from horse stables to save on costs, the Nazis would stick up to 1000 Jews, six to a bunk. In Birkenau (one of the three separate camps that comprised Auschwitz) you could only go to the bathroom twice a day: once in the morning and once at night. The diet, hard labor, and lack of proper medical treatment often resulted in horrible diarrhea, so the top bunks were often fought over so you didn't have to spend the night getting shit on by your fellow prisoners.

Speaking of the bathrooms, these were the only places the SS guards wouldn't go because they stank so horribly. The one we visited was literally a trough covered with a concrete slab with about thirty holes staggered along the top. Since this was the only place the guards would leave you alone, this was were the culture (if you can call it that) flourished in the camp.

The whole Auschwitz experience, as you can imagine, left us all sticken to silence. We're usually a pretty irreverant group. It's always the case that about half of us actually listen to the tour guides in the places we visit while the other half talks amongst themselves, which is incredibly rude and pisses me off to no end, but we were all held to rapt attention during the entire four hour tour through Auschwitz One and Two.

On display in one room was an absolutely enormous pile of human hair, all of which was shaved off of the prisoners before being gassed.
Next to the hair was a sample of cloth woven from human hair, which was often used in Nazi uniforms.
At one point we walked through one of the actual gas chambers used at the camp. One one part of the wall were three scratch marks in the concrete from somebody's fingernails. Oftentimes people would scramble over each other in a desperate attempt to escape the gas. Women and children were always on the bottom of the pile: on top were the strongest in the group.

Each new fact didn't really diminish the atrocity of the place; infants born to inmates drowned hours after birth, guards who tried to help the prisoners burned alive in the incinerators used for the corpses, prisoners who weighed only sixty pounds a whole four months after being freed. If a prisoner managed to escape, 12 prisoners would be hung in their stead. Children under fourteen were put to death instantly upon arrival at Auschwitz; if you were older you might have had a chance of being put to work and surviving.

The trip was....sobering, to say the least. There's an academic knowledge you can gain from hearing about these sorts of things, but to actually walk the mile-long stretch of train track from the front gate of Bireknau to the back, and to see the thousands of Lagers that housed the tens of thousands of prisoners was overwhelming. Even the knowledge that over a million people were put to death at the camp can't quite make the feeling hit home: the number is too big for human comprehension. Another one of those experiences that's good to have, but probably best not to repeat.