Travel that moves you: Auschwitz Concentration Camp, Poland

by Nicholas Bowditch

Daylight broke on an appropriately dismal day in Krakow,
Poland. Against the backdrop of baroque style churches, vast plazas
littered with an equal mix of cafes and pigeons, soft cool rain feel
impossibly from an overcast yet cloudless sky.

It was as if the sun didn’t want to get up today either. Today I was visiting Auschwitz.

“I just don’t know if i should
be going out there”, I had explained to the pretty Polish girl at the
reception of my hostel, “I’m not Jewish and I don’t even really know
anyone who is.”

She looked up and silently urged me to protest
further. “I’m worried I might seem a bit ghoulish or like I’m
trivialising all that suffering by wandering around taking photos like
some war tourist.”

She shook her head deliberately. “You are the type of person that we want
to go out there”, she said slowly and in carefully selected English.
“People from Australia or New Zealand or Asia – you cannot properly
understand what happened in Europe all that time ago because you are
too removed from it.”

I had to agree with that. When I had visited Pearl Harbor,
the whole experience was a lot more profound to me because it was the
Japanese and not the Nazis who had presented such a threat to my
country in World War II.

“Besides”, she said, the holocaust is too big to brush away or to just try to forget. We want the whole world to never forget what happened there.”

____________________________________

“The air around the entrance to the camp

was thick with both dew and an almost

palpable sense of sadness.”

____________________________________

I
was hit with a real foreboding as I passed through the gates and I
again wondered if the girl was wrong and I had no place being there.

So
I went. With a strange mix of curiosity and impending sadness I got on
the local bus and headed slowly out of the city and into the fertile
Polish countryside.

If it wasn’t the site of a concentration camp where up to 4,000,000
people had been killed in less than four years, it would be a pretty
spot. Very green and very quiet. The air around the entrance to the
camp was thick with both dew and an almost palpable sense of sadness.

I
was hit with a real foreboding as I passed through the gates and I
again wondered if the girl was wrong and I had no place being there.

Once inside, I was surprised how small the camp seemed. Even when the second camp, Birkenau (just down the rail tracks) is added to it, the sheer numbers of those who were killed here is unfathomable.

Jews,
Gypsies, homosexuals, transients were all transported here in box
trains from all over Europe. In the beginning, they were processed,
deloused, photographed and interned here for in some cases years, but
at the height of the ethnic cleansing its believed that thousands were
simply shipped in and exterminated.

Many of the buildings
previously used as dormitories and infirmaries now house displays that
attempt to give visitors a real insight into just how brutal this place
was.

There are rooms literally filled to the ceiling with
spectacles, shoes, even human hair that was unceremoniously taken from
the corpses of the prisoners.

Rows
and rows and rows of prisoners’ photos, taken when they first arrived
at the camp, all look desperately back at you as you walk solemnly
through the corridors. There are hundreds of them – old women and men,
young adults and most sadly small children, all having posed for the
last photo of their short and tragic lives.

This was the venue of Dr. Josef Mengele’s
sadistic “medical and scientific experiments” on many of the prisoners
including sets of twins as young as five years old. The twins were
usually murdered after the experiment, if they survived it and their
bodies were dissected.

I walked back into the compound and
follow a large group of people shuffling through the rain towards the
northern part of the camp where the shower blocks are, much like the
prisoners would have naively done, I think to myself.

Standing
outside the first of the rudimentary gas chambers I was frozen and
suddenly sure I was not going inside. An old lady with a kind face and
grand-motherly manner put her hand gently on my back.

“Is O.K.”
she says in English, which judging by her inflection was not her first
language. I just nodded to her and, somehow reassured from the empathy
of this stranger, I walked inside.

There were about forty people
in a room that is about the size of a small motel room. There are six
pipes in the roof that the prisoners believed were going to deliver
them cleansing hot water as the guards had promised them.

Most
of them believed this to be nothing more sinister than a communal
shower block. When one group entered, the next group waited behind a
row of idling trucks which the guards revved to drown out the noise of
the group inside, screaming and dying.

The guide explained that there would have been at least twice as many people crammed into the room just before the Zyklon B gas fell from the roof, mixed with the ambient oxygen and surely killed them all.

Standing
there, on the spot where so many people had died in such a gruesome
fashion, I felt many emotions without being able to isolate just one.
Fear, sadness, hopelessness, all mixed with nausea in a way that upset
me like I don’t think I had ever been upset before.

When I looked around the room, the mix of faces all said the same thing back to me, “How could they had done this?”

After
leaving the gas chambers, the tour that I was on then moved on down the
tracks to Birkenau where many more were killed. Our guide warned us
that it became more graphic and more sad down there and suggested
anyone who didn’t want to go on should wait here in the pretty green
parklands outside for the rest of the group to return.

I took him up on his invitation.

When
they returned, the group recounted to me stories of even more horror
with a sense of growing disbelief. One young German backpacker said to
me, “How could they have done this?”

I
am glad that I went. I am equally sure that I will never go back, nor
will I ever go to another of the many camps spread all over eastern
Europe.

Auschwitz is a solemn, reverent place. It is also a
gruesome, disgusting place, but a place that I hope will always be
visited by people like me, so that its unspeakable legacy will never be
forgotten.

Nicholas has spent years away from his beloved Australia in a quest

to find the world’s most deserted beach, best dive site and cheapest

beer. He is still on the lookout. He is an Independent Travel

Broker and editor of independent travel news resource,

Aussie Escape and has his own blog Where Is Bowdo?