I'm sitting in my hotel room trying to process what I've seen in a way which makes sense for a blog post. The task is impossible, and I going to fall short.
A few notes before I begin: 1) This day was brutally hot and in Birkenau there is no shade. When you see people with umbrellas, they're trying to keep cool as best as possible. Physically, it was a draining day. 2) The CANDLES museum staff did a wonderful job preparing us emotionally to enter, not saying/telling us what to think or feel, but that however we would feel was ok. I honestly didn't know how I would react.
We left Krakow early and a little more than an hour later, we arrived at Auschwitz. Tomorrow we will go to Auschwitz I where the sign everyone associates with concentration camps is, but we began in Birkenau because it is the beginning of Eva's story. For over a million people, this was all they ever saw of Auschwitz because they were selected for death immediately.
It was very surreal seeing in person an image I have seen in black-and-white my whole life- seemingly THE symbol of death and destruction.
Walking over the famous train tracks to go into Birkenau. Auschwitz I, which is nearby, was established first and was a concentration camp. Auschwitz II-Birkenau was both a concentration camp and a death camp.
Looking up at the guard tower just inside the gates.
In the morning, we began with Eva's experience. She is 87 years young and Birkenau is huge and expansive. She was given a golf cart and driver to make the trip to the stops we would be making with her. It's interesting, though we've only enchanted by this little gnome of a woman for a few days, we are all protective of her ("our Eva" is often heard) and inspired by her.
We first went to the selection platform. Eva's train brought in thousands of Jews, 70 or more to each of these cattle cars without room to sit down. She explained how they worked and how she didn't remember how she got down from the car to the ground. She turned around, and win that time her father and two older sisters disappeared and she never saw them again.
She then explained that an officer started yelling, "Twins! Twins!" when he saw she and her sister Miriam together. He asked her mother, "Are they twins?" And she responded, "Is that good?" And he said yes, so she responded that they were twins. Then, she was taken from them to Eva's right (left when looking at this picture) and sent along with more than 80% of her transport straight to the gas chambers. Eva and Miriam never got to say goodbye.
Then, Eva read to us the letter of forgiveness and love which she wrote to her father, followed by the letter she'd written to her mother. And there, in the piping hot sun, listening to her words, I wept. The depth of my love for my daughter knows no bounds; I would do anything to ensure her safety. And those hellish humans ripped countless little girls from their mothers, never to see them again. I wept for all of the children who were separated from their parents, and I wept for the parents who had to comfort their children, knowing death was to come. It wasn't a paragraph in a textbook anymore, it was living, breathing & real.
As we went on to the next location, Eva said, "If you are who you are and you like you are- you need to give a hug and kiss to your parents, because they were your first teachers. There are people like me whose parents are gone, love yours." A good reminder how thankful I am to have had three loving parents in my life. Love you, and big hugs when I get home.
Then, Eve it took us on the route with her family would have gone on, to the crematorium. She showed us the wreckage.
While we were standing there, there was an older German man who was standing in front and listening to Eva's story. She asked him where he was from and what his history was, and somehow she got him revealing that he fears what his parents knew about during the war. She then told him it was his responsibility to tell his story, and she gave him her card. He left giving her hand a kiss.
The area where Menegle's autopsies would take place in a room on the top floor of the creamatorium closest to his lab.
This barbed wire is not original because wire rusts in time. Every few years, German volunteers come and replace the wiring to maintain the historical accuracy for visitors.
The kitchen in Eva's section of the camp. Eva volunteered to carry foods to and from the kitchen. Her sister was very sick, and she was able to "organize" a which means steal - a few potatoes which would then be boiled at night. This kept her sister alive.
She was terrified that she would be killed if she was discovered, but once a cook saw her with two potatoes. She yelled at Eva, "It is not nice to steal!" Eva seemed gleeful at the fact that she had learned that as long as Dr. Mengele wanted her alive, she could not be touched.
We then had an incredible treat, Auschwitz keeps this building locked. However, we were with Eva. This building was the blood lab where Dr. Mengele and his assistant's would track progress and would draw blood/Do injections from the twins three times a week.
Eva has desperately fought to find the medical records which Dr. Menegle had, knowing what her sister was injected with might have saved her life in the early 90s. Mengele was taken by the Americans as a POW and released for an unknown reason. Eva is persistent that someday those papers will become public. She said, "Someday you who are young will hear that Mengele's files were uncovered and I will tell you that I told you so. Then it is your job to do with that information the job you were given today."
The blood lab from the outside. It looks a lot different than I was expecting. I think in my mind I saw white concrete walls, but no, another dirty barrack, though this one was used especially for medical experiments.
We then went with Eva where her barrack was located. The barrack was exclusively for the children which Dr. Joseph Mengele used in his experiments. Though part of the oldest section of Birkenau, barrack was made of wood instead of brick and is now gone.
Eva, with the sign in front of Her barrack and the flowers CANDLES brought in honor of the other twins.
Eva also talked about how right behind this area, they had a "play area" which was monitored by a SS guard whom they called the snake because she made them sing German songs and mocked them. They broke barbed wire and sharpened it to be knitting needles, she learned how to knit and Auschwitz from another Mengele twin, and made she and her sister a hat from old yarn from a sweater.
Eva also showed us where the latrines were at the end of her bunk. I had read in her book that the night she arrived, when she first went to the bathroom, she saw children's bodies on the floor, it was then that she decided that she would not allow she or Mariam's body to wind up on the floor.
Eva asked us today, "Could any of you have survived if you came here?" We all answered that we didn't think we could. "The will to live is very, very strong. And you will fight with anything in you to live."
We headed back to our bus to have lunch. The day got hotter. Soon, it was time to head back out into the camp, this time with an Auschwitz guide in smaller groups. My group's guide was Szymon (Simon).
His job was to take Eva's story and put it into the chronology of the larger camp life. So we return back to the selection platforms
Guard towers which were every so many yards. There was a guard tower right across from Eva's barrack and she said the day the Americans flew over soon before liberation, all of the guards ran down from these towers screaming and yelling. The question which has always haunted Eva, "Why didn't they bomb the railroad tracks? Think how many lives would have been saved if they had bombed the tracks."
All of the pictures around Auschwitz are from an album which was made for fun by a Nazi guard. When the Soviets came close, it had been abandoned in the camp. And a Jew found it, no history has the historical record.
Szymon asked us, "Why would they document this? They intended to win. And who does history remember? The winners."
We then followed the path which most people took straight from the selection platform to the crematorium. This is me standing in front of it for scale. It's still goes on quite a bit to the right of the picture which you can't see here. They were massive.
When new people would be taken to the concentration camp part of Birkenau, they would ask those who would been there longer questions like, "Where is my mother? I have been separated from her." And those who had been in Auschwitz for longer would say, "You're going to see your mother, coming out of those chimneys."
Between two of the crematorium, there is a memorial which was built during the 60s. In front of the memorial are plaques which all say the same thing in many different languages. There is a different plaque for every language spoken by a victim of Birkenau.
Why is there one in English? Jane Haining was a Church of Scotland missionary. She worked in Budapest in a Jewish orphanage, where she was arrested by the Nazis in 1944. She died in Auschwitz later that year.
The memorial. We will return here Friday.
One of the creamatoriums. At the end where the people in white shirts are, the victims would go down some stairs into a long room and take off all of their clothes.
Then, they would enter a room which was perpendicular to this, and the doors would be latched closed. Zyklon B would be dropped down chimneys into the room. In 20 minutes the poisonous chemical would seep into their bodies and kill them, often 2,000 people. It was a slow death in which they suffocated. The Sonderkommando, strong Jews isolated from the others, would have the job of removing them to the ovens the floor above.
Then, they would be cremated here.
We then went behind the building. Szymon showed us this pit. He explained that this is where their ashes were put. For many families this is the only place they have to come commemorate those they've lost.
Suddenly, I felt violently ill. A few people in my group were worried that I was going to pass out from the heat, but it was my stomach. I was sickened beyond words and comprehension, so much so that my body was having a physical reaction I couldn't explain. I had to walk away; it was too difficult to stay.
The building in the middle is the isolated barrack where the Sonderkommando lived apart from all of the other Jews.
Szymon, answering questions as we walked.
We then went inside a barrack.
There were two rooms which existed in every barrack. One for a leader-typetype person who is in charge of the building called a Kapo (pronounced Kah-poh) and one for food. You passed them as you entered.
This picture is for scale, so that you can see the three levels of bunks which existed. But you can also see how hot it was in the room.
An example of a chimney, like the one Eva boiled potatoes in. There were two in every barrack.
This was the children's barrack. The walls had drawings which were supposed to inspire the children for the beauty and joy to come in the German state.
The plaque outside the children's barrack.
The Menegle twins' barrack had latrines at the end, but most only had the option of going to restroom in the morning or in the evening in latrine buildings. It was said that you knew a mile away when the latrine women were leaving work, because you could smell them. But it was a highly competitive job, because even though it's smelled bad, it was warmer. And warmth meant life. Imagine- one of the best jobs you can get is to clean out the latrines of people who had lice, typhus, etc.
A small washroom barrack. There are spots to put soap, as you can see, but that's because they used the same pieces which were used in military barracks to build it. The pipes also had copper, so the water wasn't drinkable.
The Death Barrack, where those too sick, etc. were put before going to the crematorium. Eva said earlier in the day that always thought it was for crazy people because there was always yelling and screaming- they were condemned to die.
Szymon said, "Let's go outside to talk, it's hot. Well, we saw it's hot, but imagine with 600-700 more people."
Our tour for today was over. We headed back to the bus. Emotionally and physically exhausted.
Eva sat on our bus on the way home. She opened with, "Congraulations, you survived Auschwitz for one day. I made it more than two hundred. But of course, you got water bottles. We did not have that." She told the story of her life before the war and how she got to be at Birkenau. Tomorrow, we'll learn about what her liberation was like and see many exhibits.
We went back to our hotel, the grim of the day from a combination of wind, sweat, and sun was thick. I needed to take a shower. And though I've certainly been more dirty, I've never had a more cleansing shower.
Lots of love,
Mel
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