Auschwitz

So, yesterday I made the trek to Oswiecim. It's around two hours outside of Krakow by train and almost half that by bus. Quaint is how I would describe it. I would guess most have no idea of the significance of this small, unassuming Polish town, so I'll use the German name,

Auschwitz.

I'm a huge history nerd, so being in the same general part of Poland as this death camp, I felt I needed to experience it. It's one of those things that has impacted the world to such an extent it would almost have been inexcusable to tour it. 1 in 6 of the people that were murdered during the holocaust were killed there.
My first impressions was that the atmosphere was perfect. It was cold and rainy with a wind that makes you want to curl into a ball. I walked through something akin to airport security and was transported to a place much different from the chaos of the line outside.

The gate. Work makes you free. 

As soon as I walked through the gate, an eerie feeling of dread washed over me. There was no reason to my movement, I just started walking, not even searching for something to look at. I don't cope well with death, just walking over places that at one point had been piled high with corpses made me feel unnerved. 

The museum part of the camp was situated in about four of the barracks towards the back. It began with an explanation of why the nazi's felt they needed to bring about the final solution, and then went on to show evidence of the slaughter. 

What was left of the camp was mainly just barracks like these. 

In one part of the museum, there were just rooms filled with shoes, suitcases, cookware, toiletries, and prosthetic limbs. Another room was filled with hair that had been taken off of the recently killed to be sold to textile factories and insulate u-boats. If you looked closely into the pile you could see braids. That hit me hard because I put little girls and braided hair into the same group. 

A canister of Zyklon B pellets, the type of poison used in the gas chambers. When I was in Hamburg, I saw the building that housed the factory that produced these pellets. The owners of the factory were tried and hung and the building is now a chocolate factory. I find that fitting. 

I walked into the gas chambers and the crematoria and took two pictures. The one above is of what the walls looked like. Those are groves scratched into the wall by the people being gassed. You often hear about the scratches in the wall, but it still came as a shock to me to see how deep they were. They do a good job of illustrating how many people actually met their fate in that room. I got out of there as quickly as I could. 

Crematoria.

Those metal things were like stretchers on tracks that went into the gas chamber to make lifting corpses into the furnace easier. 

Throughout my time at Auschwitz I kept thinking of a line from the movie Blade Runner; 

"All these moments lost in time, like tears in rain". 

It was just a shame that all of these people died. They weren't faceless, they had jobs, and positions, and family, and lives. 

The collective life that was destroyed when a group of men decided it was useless is an incredible slight to the world. 

I'm having a hard time finding words to describe my experience here so I think I'll end it at that.