A friend with whom Portsmouth-based writer and planetary modeller David Angus travelled around Europe wished to go to Auschwitz. This is David’s account of that troubling experience.
Another Jewish friend, Ric, compared the Ian Brady/Myra Hindley child murders to Auschwitz as a ‘Cheddar Gorge’ to a ‘Grand Canyon of Evil.’ Ric was referring to the scale of the crimes: unlike the Moors Murders, vast numbers of people had been responsible for and, more importantly, been the victims of Auschwitz and the other Nazi concentration camps.
Our guide was a blonde Polish lady with a pinched expression. Her voice was memorably commanding and my companion Jocelyn ragged me about her making a ‘good dominatrix.’ There was also something about the rhythmic, hypnotic quality of this lady’s voice. If there’s an afterlife I might expect to meet an angel of judgement decreeing in that voice whether one was destined to scrape into heaven or a circle of hell. She was a teacher by trade and I bet she was a good one.
I suspected that this barracks we’d arrived at wasn’t all there was to Auschwitz and that there was another bigger camp somewhere. Our guide said there were three: the one we were at; Auschwitz-Birkenau and IG Farben. Our guide may have stressed the existence of this third Auschwitz because the local Poles were forced to build the IG Farben industrial complex. It is massive: two miles across.
IG Farben was a German chemical conglomerate, once the largest such company in the world. It chose a site on the other side of Oświęcim – I dimly remembered an industrial complex coming in – because of tax incentives after the invasion of Poland, good rail communications and slave labour. The company employed thousands of concentration camp prisoners, many having to walk four to five miles there and the same back. Others were held at a camp called ‘Monowitz-Buna’ or ‘Auschwitz III.’ One estimate of the total numbers of Auschwitz inmates working at IG Farben is 35,000. The excessive workload organised by IG Farben is what killed most of them.
The conglomerate also manufactured synthetic rubber for the German war effort – which probably was a reason for the existence of the tyre establishment I’d seen nearby – and was responsible for the infamous Zyklon B: the pesticide that exterminated so many victims in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other camps. The cruel irony here is that prisoners at IG Farben were working on this poison that was used to kill them.
After the war IG Farben was justly reviled, its bosses tried at Nuremberg and the concern only kept going in order to compensate its victims. 13 IG Farben directors were sentenced to – in my view – lenient terms of one to eight years. Even then, some went on to become leaders of post-war companies.
Our guide led us around the barracks. It was ghoulish and I was determined not to take tourist-type photos. My solution was to doctor each one I did take here with Adobe Photoshop in an attempt to convey something of the infernal horror of the place. Past the barbed wire fences that had been electrified. Past interior displays involving photographs of inmates. Many of them women. Jocelyn thought some of them were attractive: a miracle given their situation.
Past photos of the selection process the Jews were put through on arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Dr Josef ‘the Angel of Death’ Mengele was there. A slight, almost boyish figure in uniform, looking cheerful. He was notorious for his experiments on children. Talk about child abuse with a difference! And he was never actually brought to justice for his crimes, inexplicably telling his son after the war in South America that ‘he had never personally harmed anyone in his whole life’ before finally dying on a Brazilian beach.
Past sections of large rooms walled off by glass, almost like a larger version of those secure glass fronted enclosures in a reptile house inhabited by pythons and alligators. Only here it was exhibits. Anything from artificial limbs to suitcases and other hand luggage. One could see the names of the people involved on this luggage. Many looked Jewish and by far the majority of them were. They were told these items would be sent on to them. A lie involving a whole race.
It got to me when a crowd of us were shuffling past the shoes. I felt claustrophobic and looked through the glass to my left. It looked like a dark brown landscape in there before it became clear it was made up of mounds of shoes. I began to feel overwhelmed and trapped.
Ric had already been here years ago when the Russians were in control, when the camp retained much of its earlier grimness. He told me he’d felt devastated when he realised the belongings on display – representing the many who were murdered – were only a tiny fraction of the number who passed through here: a minuscule representation of the true scale of state induced murder. It’s difficult to come to an accurate figure but according to the information here roughly 1,100,000 people died here, 90% of which were Jews. Other groups of fatalities in descending order of size were Poles, gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, and others.
I noticed children amongst the other visitors. What the hell was the mother thinking of? She was carrying a little girl who was protesting and had a small son in tow too, who was quiet and glum. Most likely the infant girl felt frustrated at being conveyed at a snail’s pace, without realising what this place was about. I wondered if she sensed that children had been murdered en masse here too. She was giving her mother a lot of stick, justifiably in my opinion.
Another child was to figure in what the guide told us after we’d visited a barrack block that was a prison within a prison for those violating the numerous rules and those hauled in from the local neighbourhood. This included cells so constricted that inmates could only stand up in them. Outside was an ominous grey wall with stakes where prisoners would be shot. Our guide gave us two examples at opposite ends of the scale. There was a priest of high principles who’d spoken out against this evil regardless of how futile or dangerous it was. If one had the mindset of the SS the only way to stop someone like that was to shoot them. On the other hand there was a nine-year-old boy who threw an apple at prisoners in an attempt to feed them on the march to or from IG Farben. He was also shot for this act.
It was portrayed as a charitable act but an apple is a handy thing for a boy to bung in a spirit of mischief, knowing that it’s pretty unlikely to cause injury but hard enough for the target to know all about it if it hits them. The sort of thing that would have earned a clip round the ear when I was a boy or a disagreeable lecture now – not a bullet. Either way, the mentality of those who shot him is beyond comprehension.
Finally there was a gas chamber. Bunker-like. Constructed that way to retain and build body heat from those who were packed in there. That would help to vaporise the Zyklon B into a poison gas. The SS lived nearby in homes they’d chucked the local Poles out of. Some of these were near-idyllic despite what was down the road. The film The Zone of Interest explores this. One of the most astronomically idiotic comments of all time was uttered by the wife of an SS officer: her sentiment being why bother with heaven when it’s here at Auschwitz? None but the terminally stupid or insane could fail to suspect that what was here was not heaven but an attempt to create its opposite.
This became more apparent at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was set up at the end of 1941 to ease overcrowding at Auschwitz I; destroying most of a Polish village named after a birch tree in the process. ‘Birkenau’ is German for birch tree. It was converted for mass-scale extermination in early 1943. We were taken to the main gate: that long building with a central watchtower under which was an arch over a railway line, going straight through the building. Many must have seen it on documentaries as I had. Also in a war film and even as the entrance to a city in Dante’s Inferno on one occasion. In the film and the Inferno, a searchlight on top of the tower was swept to and fro. Ignoring the weather, which remained pleasant, I’ve tried to simulate this with Adobe Photoshop.
I had thought that the Jews were unloaded from the cattle trucks outside the main gate but in actual fact the trains simply rolled along the single track through the arch into the middle of the camp where the railway split into several tracks. The unloading and selection process took place there. The railway inside the camp was a kilometre long I was told, but Google Earth shows it as being more like 3/4 of a kilometre. The camp was more than a kilometre across the other way and there was an extension to that under construction later.
This was where the scale of what’s called the Holocaust became more apparent. Auschwitz-Birkenau was bordered by trees which weren’t absent in the 1940s but the present ones – still distant – would have been small or non existent then; if the woods invading Pripyat near Chernobyl were anything to go by. Somehow I doubt there was as much grass too, which grew here plentifully now. Add to that the views of regimented blocks of single story huts everywhere and it would have been easy to feel that this dismal vista had taken over infinity. In other words: a man made circle of Hell.
It might as well have stretched to infinity as far as the prisoners were concerned. Those that weren’t sent to the gas chambers were crammed into what were more like deep shelves rather than bunks in those blocks. At least the ones that were brick built rather than wooden. When one turned over asleep or otherwise everyone else had to. It was also a race to get to the top communal bunk after enduring evening roll call, or at least the middle rather than the bottom; because sanitary facilities were non existent in the blocks and communal toilets were only available at set times under supervision. The further down one was the more crap one had to cope with. Literally.
That and there being no clean water for two years meant that just existing there made one a candidate for disease.
There was also winter. Despite there being chimney flues in each block there was no fuel for heating and most of the blocks were wooden, which provided little protection from the intense cold. It was summer now and I felt guilty feeling comfortable in a place like this.
The brick blocks were on one side of the railway; mostly they’d housed female prisoners. Most of the camp where the wooden dwellings were was on the other side. There were built that way because the Nazis realised it was cheaper. All the wood was now gone. What remained were the foundations and the flues; which stuck up everywhere like a huge field of outsized tombstones, a sinister mute message about everyone who had died here.
Then there were the gas chambers and the crematoria. Destroyed by the SS before Auschwitz was liberated by the Russians. Their ruins looked like Hell had regurgitated some of its contents here. This was where many of the women and children were sent and where the Sonderkommandos did most of their work. Our guide remarked that the killing was the easy part. Disposal of bodies on the scale of thousands was a much harder task. The crematoria worked around the clock at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The ‘Sonderkommando’ was the ‘special unit’ recruited from Jews. Most of their work involved the appalling task of body disposal at the crematoria. They had a special barracks and were more able to obtain food and clothing. Not that it did them much good, for every 4 months or so the Nazis disposed and replaced them.
One other class of ‘worker’ was favoured in the camp. We could still see that just inside the entrances to the brick built blocks was a small room. These were better lodgings for ‘kapos:’ the head of each block who held absolute power here and received better rations.
There was a memorial near the ruins. The sentiment I remember here is that of utter loss of hope. One reason why it should never happen again.
Image ‘Auschwitz-Work Set Free-new.JPG’ re-used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licence.
