My Visit To Auschwitz Still Haunts me

I visited Auschwitz in the summer of 2007 and the memories I took away from the experience haunt me till this day. It’s something that keeps occurring to me at random moments, sending shivers down me and morbid thoughts I’d rather not have.

I’ve never been affected by anything quite like it. All the places I’ve visited and all the things I’ve seen haven’t had remotely the effect that Auschwitz had on me. And I was surrounded by hoards of tourists and guides, it’s not like I was left all alone in an eerie prisoner block by mistake.

The fact is, I’m not alone. I know someone who visited the place before I went and claimed a similar reaction. He said that he was badly perturbed by the sound of a baby crying in one of the blocks he visited (they have various blocks open to the public during visiting hours, and they contain wall charts, picture guides and most ominously of all, glass tanks full of hair, shoes, combs and belongings that were once owned by detained Jews). The thing is…he looked all around, and there was no baby. And no sound system. He didn’t know where it came from.

My experiences of the starvation and torture cells were the worst of all. They were held below the block where Polish ‘political prisoners’ and ’sabateurs’ were ‘tried’ by kangaroo courts. (These prisoners were often adolescent lads who were caught walking too near the camp. More often than not, they were out farming land or tending to errands).

The green slime that traces down from the tiny slitted window still exists, as does the original, macabre, depressing wall paper in the main corridors.

One particular cell in this block had my skin crawling with nerves and revulsion. It was a punishment cell that contained a very small bricked compartment, or chimney for want of a better expression. It had a tiny trap door at the bottom of it but no hole or area for light or air.

Apparently, and it beggars belief, when prisoners were caught doing something wrong (I understand this could be for the most spurious or made up offence) they were forced to undergo 72 hours, sometimes more, of perpetual punishment, which in this case entailed being made to work for 12 hours solid on the outside, then being brought into the cell and forced by baton into the bricked compartment, where there was standing room for 4 only (it was always at maximum capacity).

The prisoners were not allowed to eat or drink during ANY of this punishment phase, and they couldn’t sit down for a second. They were forced to stand, shivering and shitting, in the dark, until dawn, when they were dragged and mercilessly thrashed by the Capos until they succumbed and sloped out of the bricked prison…then back to work.

More often than not, people died in the horrid contraption overnight. Or, they died outside. Pretty much no-one came out of this process alive.

The same block contained a starvation cell, and, to my horror, a suffocation cell which lived up to its name sake as a place where people failed to get enough air to make it to morning.

On the left hand side of this block was the alley where prisoners were lined up against the wall and shot. The bullet holes were there for all to see. And the block to the left of this alley had its windows boarded up so as to lessen the overt terror of inmates (they wanted to avert excessive exposure to prisoners of the violence for fear of mass panic).

When going around some of the other blocks, I saw enormous glass tanks filled with infinite numbers of items that belonged to the prisoners of Auschwitz. The most depressing one for me was the hair. Endless mounds of the stuff. Not fake or reproduction for effect. I mean real hair, real stuff. real Zyklon B canisters, and real shoes and crutches for the infirm.

One of the last blocks we visited was a sanitary block, where the loos were. They were bloody awful. A long horse trough, essentially, with holes in them where people sat and shat out what little they ate (small amounts of rotten veg soup apparently). The guide said that the two prisoners who had the all day job of clearing out the bogs had the best and most luxurious and blessed jobs out of all the camp. Simply because they were left to it, and had a roof over them (I can’t even begin to imagine what winter in Poland was like, wearing nothing more than pyjamas and flip flops). The toilet cleaners had the unheard of gift of being able to speak to each-other without too much fear of punishment. They were also less likely to be brutalised and murdered.

The sleeping quarters of the surrounding blocks would have been unfit for farm animals. The bunks were 2 men to a bunk, and no sheets or pillows. They slept on wood, facing alternate directions, with nothing but their stinking, frayed boots for head props. Quite often, people died overnight and the conditions got nasty once people started throwing up and shitting themselves through disease and hunger.

At the end of the tour we were taken over to the crematoria and gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau, which are demolished though still evident and important. These are at the back of the camp (the larger of the three camps set up under the Auschwitz banner) near a row of trees along the perimeter fence. They were placed there as they were far from the main blocks. The Nazis wanted to keep the whole operation as secret as possible.

They say the colossal mounds of ash that billowed from the chimneys of the crematoria drifted down on the rest of the camp and the stench of the burning bodies could be detected for miles.

It was truly frightening. The biggest symbol and example of what Man can do to others, and how low human beings can stoop given the right (or wrong should I say) set of circumstances.

Auschwitz Birkenau is huge. It stretches on for what seems miles. Yet most of the ‘action’ took place at the train station platform (the line ended right in the middle of the camp and the platform was handily central so the guards could disembark the still-living ‘passengers’ and organise them efficiently.

Here at the platform, daily once the camp was fully set up and the war was pushing on, large numbers of mainly Hungarian and Romanian Jews were sorted into line, and those deemed fit for work (the much smaller number) were separated and the rest were marched to the gas chambers. The guide stated that sometimes, the numbers were so huge, the Capos and guards could not process them quick enough, and groups of Jews and other prisoners were made to sit in the nearby forest to literally wait patiently for their turn to die.

The Zyklon B gas was not actually gas, contrary to what I thought before. They are crystals. Large, tough crystals, that vapourise when they come into contact with warm air. The gas chambers were naturally fertile areas for the crystals to immediately go up in smoke, and the rest was history. Lots of screaming and banging on the door and then silence.

I’ve read that brute Rudolf Hoss’s autobiography “A Commandant of Auschwitz” (forced from him in Allied captivity in 1946 before he was sentenced to hang). He freely admits to the systematic slaughter of the captives (mainly Jews). He numbers them at around 2 million. This is probably accurate.

He describes the moment an angry screaming Jewish woman thrust herself at him spitting, before being carted off with her child in her arms to the chambers. He stood there while it all happened. And then, elsewhere in the book, had the amazing arrogance and temerity to blame it all on being orders, and the harshness of the camp being down to unruly and unmanageable minions, i.e. the Jewish Capos.

Once the war move to its conclusion, Auschwitz fell under orders from the top that no camp was to be taken by the allies. No prisoners were to be allowed to fall into enemy hands, the actual order from Hitler ran.

This led to an acceleration of random, brutal, mass, arbitrary killings, which often entailed being beaten to death by capos, or, being hung along a particular parade ground.

The camp was never fully liquidated however, and the final end game came when the crematoria were blown up and the remaining 20,000 prisoners were forced to undergo the infamous ‘death march‘ all the way from Poland to Bergen Belsen in East Germany. When I think how much I complain when I walk a couple of miles into town in my trainers to get some milk, it doesn’t take long for my mind to drift to the image of those poor people forced to trek, in the bitter cold, endless miles in broken sandals, destined to die either by cold, hunger, tiredness of by a weapon.

Most did die on the death march.

I suggest that if you haven’t been to visit Auschwitz, do. It is a terrible yet important and necessary experience in my view. It awakens the most apathetic and indifferent of minds to the true horrors of our history which must never be repeated.

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