Auschwitz: We Remember and May We Never Forget

Last night before heading to bed I did a quick search to scan through the day's news headlines and a Los Angeles Times article caught my eye.  Here is a link to the story: On anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation, world remembers Holocaust amid signs of rising hate.

Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the 73rd anniversary of the Soviet army liberating the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in occupied Poland.  I wanted to mark and remember that day by spending some time today sharing photos from our visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau two weekends ago.

I think, like most American students, my first exposure and introduction to the Holocaust came through reading Night by Elie Wiesel.  In the book, Wiesel shares his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald during 1944-1945.  Wiesel and his family were among an estimated 430,000 Hungarian Jews deported to the death camp.   His father died just three months before liberation and his mother and little sister were killed in the gas chambers.  Wiesel and his two oldest sisters survived.  Oprah did an interview with Wiesel at Auschwitz around 2006 I believe.  I was able to find the full video posted on YouTube.  Here is a link if you'd like to watch it.   

It is estimated that 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz.  90 percent of whom were Jews.

A train transporting Hungarian Jews arrives at Auschwitz in 1944

Deported Hungarian Jews - young Jewish children were sent directly to the gas chambers.

Selection at Auschwitz.  If directed to the right it was immediate death in the gas chambers.

Auschwitz II - Birkenau is about two miles from the original Auschwitz I camp.  It was built in a farm field when the Nazis realized in 1941 that the original camp was too small.  Before our trip we started watching a really good BBC documentary series available on Netflix called Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution.  It's a very comprehensive six-part series.  I would highly recommend it.

Auschwitz II is where the train transports arrived, where the selection/sorting occurred, and where four massive crematoria were constructed.  Each crematoria had the capacity to cremate more than 4,400 people a day.  If I recall correctly, I think one of the crematorias was destroyed by the resistance within the camp before liberation and the Nazis blew up the other three trying to destroy the evidence of what they had done.

The Guard Tower - a powerful image you may recall from the movie Schindler's List

Near the sorting platform

Death numbers are only estimates because those individuals sent immediately to the gas chambers
were never recorded in the camp records.

Auschwitz I was a Polish army base before the war and was transformed into a concentration camp by the Nazis.  This is where the main exhibits are for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.  

The infamous 'Work Makes Free' sign.

One of the block buildings.  Several exhibits are inside these buildings.

Electrified fencing surrounded the camp

We had a great tour guide who walked us through both camps.  I think when you are visiting a place like Auschwitz -- where death happened on such a massive, calculating, and unfathomable scale -- that you have to find individual things that you can connect to.  One of the exhibits is a long glass case holding suitcases of the victims.  Tom got a picture of me looking at all the suitcases.

I really wanted to make a connection to an individual and I found it with this suitcase bearing the same name as my brother, Erik. 

There is also an exhibit that holds prosthetic limbs and crutches and the pink leg stood out so strongly to me.  The disabled were deemed unfit for work and were sent immediately to their deaths.  Each of these limbs represents a person, a human being, a life.

In one of the building blocks they have photographs of victims lining the walls.  Each victim is identified with a name, birth date, date of arrival and date of death.  These were the individuals considered able to work and many only survived a month or two, while others survived maybe a year.

A 22 year old Polish woman who survived Auschwitz for nine months.

A young Jewish man named Moses who died about five months before his 19th birthday.

This is certainly not a comprehensive overview of our visit to Auschwitz.  I just wanted to give you a feeling of what it's like to visit the museum and memorial.  I think it's a place that everyone who has the opportunity to visit Poland should make a point of seeing.  But visiting Europe, and Poland specifically, is not possible for everyone.

If you live in the United States I would highly recommend going to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.  I have visited the museum twice.  It was back in the late nineties, so I'm not sure if they still do this, but when I visited they gave you a paper passport booklet and inside the passport is the story of a real person from the Holocaust.  As you go through each level of the museum's exhibits, the passport tells you what was happening to that individual person.  By the end, you know if they survived or died.  I think it's a really important aspect of the museum that helps you connect to a single life in the midst of the millions systematically killed and impacted.

After we got home from visiting Poland, we talked with several friends and co-workers about the experience of visiting Auschwitz.  I also shared some photos on my social media sites.  One of the missions of preserving the sites of Auschwitz-Birkenau is to serve as a testimony of evil and what hate and prejudice can lead to so that hopefully something like this will never happen again.

One of my favorite books of all time is Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place.  Corrie, her sister, and their father were part of the underground during the war and helped many Jews escape the Nazis in occupied Netherlands.

The Gestapo raided the ten Boom home on February 28, 1944, and the ten Booms were arrested and incarcerated.  Corrie's 84-year-old father Casper died shortly afterwards in the Scheveningen prison, near the Hague.  Corrie and her sister Betsie were transported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp near Berlin.  Betsie died there on December 16, 1944.  Corrie survived the war and went on to be a prolific writer and speaker.  She died on her 91st birthday, April 15, 1983.

I've read The Hiding Place three times and have given it away as a gift probably close to a dozen times.  The family is recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" and a tree is planted in their honor at Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.  Below is a picture of their plaque.  Tom and I were able to find their tree when we were in Israel a couple years ago.

The Righteous Among the Nations are non-Jews who took great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust.  When I read The Hiding Place or Tilar Mazzeo's book Irena's Children, or think about those individuals who helped hide Anne Frank and her family, or visit the Dachau Concentration Camp or Auschwitz, I can only hope that I would have been brave enough to do the same.