Auschwitz & Birkenau

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No photo's, no blog for the 17th. We'd left crappy camp early and driven straight to Oswiecim having decided to give Krakow a miss as we were on a bit of downer about Poland. The industrial ribbon development in the east, a legacy of Soviet occupation, made depressing traveling on crap road surfaces and village/town immediately after village/town made good progress impossible. That and bad sleep, bad camp and food poisoning. So we headed for Oswiecim as it's known in Poland, infamous elsewhere as Auschwitz.

Auschwitz and Birkenau are only 3km apart. Auschwitz was the concentration camp and was initially set up as a prison camp for German occupied Poland on the site of deserted pre-war Polish barracks and well situated on the railway network. Birkenau, however, was designed as an extermination camp.

Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Brings Freedom, is the cynical inscription above the main gate at Auschwitz. The camp orchestra, made up of inmates, would play a march – it was easier to count the prisoners on work detail in and out each day.

The orderly brick and tile 2 story buildings at Auschwitz contain the bulk of the exhibits of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum. Each has its own poignancy for different people. For me it was the room of prosthetic limbs and particularly the children's false legs, for Vanessa it was the small shoes.

Birkenau is on a much bigger scale. The main watch tower straddles the railway line, and the vista from it doesn't really signify how big it all is until you've walked around the camp and back. For every 4 people that arrived only 1 made work detail, the rest were sent straight to the gas chambers. Given that there were up to 90,000 people 'living' in the camp gives some indication of the murder on an industrial scale.

Inside one of the brick built huts, the area pictures housed c.120 people, each hut over 1,000 people.

The only exhibit at Birkenau is in the washrooms, where new arrivals were stripped of their possessions, their clothes, their hair. These are some of the photographs people left behind; of family and friends in happier times, on camping trips in the mountains or on picnics.