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Be Advised:

This post contains images taken at Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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I’ve thought a lot about whether or not I wanted to make this into a post, and whether or not I would include any photos from the tour at all. I came to the conclusion that many people I know will never get the chance to see these places first-hand and it is my belief that such things need to be shared, not hidden away, lest we forget and repeat the past.

My first impression was that it was too green.

I don’t know why I assumed that nothing could grow around the most infamous Nazi death camp, but I just never pictured the grass and trees and singing birds that I saw when approaching the Auschwitz sign.

It was odd to see something in person that I had seen as a kid in school in textbooks. It was even odder still that now the German made sense to me in a way it never had before. “Arbeit macht frei”, I now translated to “works makes you free” before the tour guide could give us the version I knew growing up, “work sets you free”.

It was insane to see the exhibits they had set up, showing how far-reaching Auschwitz truly was, how large of a camp it had to be to cover so much area across Europe.

We saw stacks and stacks of Zyklon B, the gas they used in the chambers.

These massive piles of objects only begin to paint a picture of the amount of people who came though here.

The yard by the “Death Block” where they held executions.

 

The gas chambers, with the “ovens”.

Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, is more what I expected of Auschwitz I. It is about 5 minutes away from Auschwitz I, and is in a large field, with a railway running through the middle on which the prisoners were brought into the camp.

They had an original train car on display.

The ruins of a gas chamber that the Nazis blew up before the liberation of the camp.

The sleeping quarters themselves were our last stop on the tour. Imagining 4 or more people on each of these “bunks” is hard, even when you are standing there and looking at them.

The magnitude of these camps was something I could not have prepared for. I feel that it was an important thing to do, and it reminded me of both the horrors and the love that mankind is capable of. There were a million ugly things about these camps, but, amidst all of that, there were stories about the people who survived or fought back or sacrificed themselves for another. Some things just need to be seen, and I think that Auschwitz is one of them. The monument at Birkenau sums up the importance of the preservation of the past, however bleak: “For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity”.