July 3 - Auschwitz & Birkenau 🇵🇱

This was the site of one of humanity’s greatest crimes: the systematic murder of at least 1.1 million innocent people. From 1941 until 1945, the village of Oswiecim was the home of Auschwitz, the biggest, most notorious concentration camp in the Nazi system. Today, Auschwitz is the most poignant memorial anywhere to the victims of the Holocaust. From the moment we walked past the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate and indoor museum exhibits in former prison buildings, our stomach soured, and the horror of this place sat heavy upon us. We hired a private guide, Marta, who spent 6 hours with us walking the camp and taking us behind the scenes into former barracks and the various “Blocks.” Block 4: Extermination; Block 5: Material Evidence of the Nazi’s Crimes (piles of the victims’ goods, a tiny fraction of everything the Nazi’s stole); Block 11: The Death Block from which nobody ever left alive. Marta was a walking encyclopedia, and having personally met & interviewed several Holocaust survivors, she was able to retell their stories which added to the gravity of the history she recounted. We took a moment for silent reflection and prayer before moving on to Birkenau. In 1941, realizing that the original Auschwitz camp was too small to meet their needs, the Nazis began a second camp in some nearby farm fields. At its peak, Birkenau held 100,000 prisoners and made the original Auschwitz look 5-star by comparison! Wooden barracks, not brick, massive latrines, an imposing guard tower with several smaller ones, miles & miles of barbed wire and 4 massive crematoria, all of which were destroyed by the Nazis in the last days before the Russian Red Army liberated the few remaining prisoners. Birkenau sprawls for a frightening distance. The train platform runs just about to the crematorium, and in its final days, trains arrived packed with Jews from Hungary, 450,000 of them, most of whom were sent immediately upon arrival to the gas chambers. The size and scale of Birkenau is mind boggling and the efficiency of the extermination is evidence of the planning and forethought the Nazis gave to “the final solution.“ If there was ever hell on earth this was it.