Auschwitz II: Birkenau

[metaphorge]

DSCF0507, originally uploaded by metaphorge.

Auschwitz II (Birkenau) is the camp that many people know simply as "Auschwitz". It was the site of imprisonment of hundreds of thousands, and of the killing of over one million people, mainly Jews but also large numbers of Poles, and Gypsies.

Birkenau was largely destroyed by the Nazis in an attempt to cover up their crimes, so little remains except the chimneys for most of the buildings that the prisoners were kept in. The scale of the place is astonishing; as you can see from the photo, the chimneys stretch on as far as the eye can see across the sprawling 440 acre complex.

Bear in mind that three-quarters of the prisoners who were sent to Birkenau were gassed within a few hours of arrival, so all of these buildings were needed to house only the remaining quarter, who were utlized as slave labor in nearby industrial plants.

There are more photos of Birkenau here; obviously, some of you may find them trigger-y.

I did not get to make as many photos at Birkenau as I would have liked, as it was already getting quite dark (though it was only about 4pm Central European Time, the days here are very short suring winter) and my digital cam was running on fumes. In any case, there's no way that any photograph could possibly capture what it is like to be there.

Comments

[thebluestar98.livejournal.com]

fairly recently, i read Man's Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl... he was a prisoner at Auschwitz. It is an amazing short book.

[asher63.livejournal.com]

Frankl is amazing. His book helped me in more ways than I can possibly express.

Another hero from that era was Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, who lived in Warsaw during the German occupation and went to his death in Treblinka. Shapira's entire family was wiped out during the initial bombing raids, but he somehow found the strength to teach and inspire his followers until the very end.

[asher63.livejournal.com]

My God.

[cherrypep.livejournal.com]

Not to forget various other nationalities. And homosexuals. Who, when the European Parliament's resolution passed on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was read out on that date, were removed from the list of victims. Because, hey, there weren't that many of them, compared. (We don't pay so much attention to the fate of the German disabled, come to that - but they were offed elsewhere, if I recall).

We humans have this thing about neat simple stories and neat simple classifications, but to my mind the really foul thing about the whole story is the way that the Nazis went through the metaphorical yellow pages from A-Z looking for victims. Nobody was immune. A German friend still has her ID card from when she was a young girl during the war (Slavic nose apparently - most untrustworthy. Labelled & carefully monitored). They were way beyond any sort of logic, even the sort of loony justification that has anybody sane leaping for cover, and far into foaming barking-at-the-mouth rabidity.

All of which changes nothing major in one sense, since numerically your list is mostly accurate. Eh. Sorry.

[metaphorge.livejournal.com]

Your points are definitely worth mentioning, and I probably would have done so if I'd had time to write something more than a couple of paragraphs on the subject. In this case, I was only attempting to cover the specifics of what went on at the Birkenau facillity in particular, rather than cover who the Nazis had it in for as a whole (if I was going to do that, I1d have started with their planned program to sterilize ALL the slavs).

[insomnia.livejournal.com]

Auschwitz II: Electic fenced boogaloo!

I have incredibly mixed feelings...

[fearsclave.livejournal.com]

...about leaving the concentration camp sites open as tourist attractions. On the one had, we need, really, really need to understand the insane, lunatic evil of the period. On the other hand, looking at those photos gives me a visceral urge to demolish the actual place. Erase it completely. Grind all the brick and concrete into powder, rip up the railway tracks, destroy all trace of it and plant a forest. Or something.

I really don't think I could stand visiting it. And Dick Cheney and his fucking olive drab parka...

Re: I have incredibly mixed feelings...

[ariedana.livejournal.com]

I think you have to leave some of those sites up and open, just to keep easily-seen evidence to refute the crap that Ernst Zundel and his ilk spew. That's one of the reasons I'm so grateful for the Nizkor Project. It's hard as hell to read the stuff they've compiled, but it's important to do so.

Of course, the same should be said for Gitmo, on some level...

Re: I have incredibly mixed feelings...

[fearsclave.livejournal.com]

Hm. At first, I thought "you know, comparing Gitmo to Auschwitz isn't really all that apt, both in terms of scale and nastiness", but then I realized that the Third Reich made no pretenses about being anything other than a murderously anti-Semitic police state. If you're going to hold yourself out as a bastion of democracy and human rights, even something as relatively small-scale as Gitmo is horrendously shameful...

Re: I have incredibly mixed feelings...

[metaphorge.livejournal.com]

I think the comparisons are partially dependent on which camps are being used to draw a comparison. No one, anywhere else, in the history of this planet has built or attempted anything remotely comparable to Birkenau and the other large-scale extermination camps, but other facillities were comparable in function and methodology to Gitmo.

While American treatment of those held at Gitmo is as of yet not as bad as the worst the Nazis had to offer, Gitmo is, by definition, a concentration camp, just as the facillities that Japanese-Americans were interred in during World War II. That's a fact that we as Americans really need to face up to.

Re: I have incredibly mixed feelings...

[metaphorge.livejournal.com]

I share some of your mixed feelings on the matter, but I have to come down on the side of maintaining some of these places as reminders. We have a remarkably short attention span as a species, and most attempted genocides of this scale haven't left such compelling evidence behind (for example, very few people have any awareness whatsoever of King Leopold's extermination of millions in the Congo in the earlz part of the 20th century; I think this is partially because of a lack of an evidence trail that is beyond the anecdotal and photographic).

I think Birkenau is particularly valuable because it really communicates the scale of what was going on due to it1s sheer sprawl. At it's peak, Birkenau could gas and cremate 60,000 people a day....

Re: I have incredibly mixed feelings...

[fearsclave.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Ultimately, I think you're right. The Nazis' victims need some sort of monument, and as a species we're forgetful enough to need reminders even of horrors like that. Razing Auschwitz and planting a forest would take that away.

I can't ever imagine visiting the place in person, though. I find even photos of it gutwrenching.

[ariedana.livejournal.com]

Were the brick ruins left over from the crematoriums? They just look like they might be.

In the museum, did they have anything about St. Maximillan Kolbe? Wow, when you chose him for your patron saint in RCIA, I bet you never thought you'd end up visiting the place where he died.

The pictures are gut-churning. Thanks for sharing them.

[metaphorge.livejournal.com]

Were the brick ruins left over from the crematoriums?

Yes, the long exposures at the end were the gas chambers, crematoriums and Mengele's lab at Birkenau. Remind me to tell you about the pond when we next speak.
In the museum, did they have anything about St. Maximillan Kolbe? Wow, when you chose him for your patron saint in RCIA, I bet you never thought you'd end up visiting the place where he died.

I was unable to photograph this, but yes, I saw Cell 18 in Block 11 at Auschwitz I, which is where Father Kolbe was starved to death. There was a candle burning for him there.

I suspected I would visit there some day.

Also: http://metaphorge.livejournal.com/939416.html

[dorei.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing ... I think.

We lost family in Auschwitz. There were a number of great-aunts and uncles I never knew.

Note to self.

[byrdie.livejournal.com]

I managed to handle looking at the photos, but next time I should not have my mp3 player set to random. Baby's on Fire off the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack just made my stomach lurch.