Auschwitz-Birkenau Notes

Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in Europe before the war. Out of an estimated population of 3.3 million, close to 3 million were finished off by the Nazis. In Auschwitz, 1.1 million (of which Jews were a million and the rest Poles, Romas, gypsies, homosexuals and Soviet PoWs) were slaughtered between its establishment in May 1940 and its liberation by the Soviets in February 1945. Almost every village and street in Poland had someone interned in the camp.

It takes 90 minutes to reach Auschwitz from Krakow. Relying on a group tour is the easiest way to get to the place. On reaching Auschwitz and seeing the parks, supermarkets, and residential colonies, I was wondering what it must mean for the people there to identify themselves as residents of ‘Auschwitz’. There probably is no other town in the world that is associated with mass murder at such scale. (Phnom Penh, Srebrenica, Kigali etc are the other contenders but they pale in terms of scale).

Until the late nineties, it was common to have survivors of the camp visiting the site as part of groups. Our guide mentioned numerous examples where survivors quietly spoke up, displayed the tattoos of their registration number on their arms, and went on to point to the spots where they were locked up and made to work. I haven’t heard anything as poignant and wrenching as this in a long time.

Galleries displaying shoes, crutches, utensils, spectacles and suitcases can become quite numbing after a point. (Sruthi spent a sleepless night after seeing the gallery of kids’ shoes.) To imagine each article to have been a prized possession of families and clutched all the way to the camp and now eerily being displayed with no information about their dead owners is something that takes a lot of effort. The only gallery where we were instructed not to click photographs was the one that displayed the hair tonsured from the prisoners, as what was on display was once an integral body part of a living and breathing human being.

The bookstore in the museum had a lovely boxed set of writings by the most famous survivors of the camp. I only could recognize Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. (Must check out the others too…)

Anne Frank too was interned in Auschwitz but was later moved to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus.

Birkenau is around 20 minutes away from the main camp of Auschwitz and is famous for its menacing (iconic cant be used I suppose) railroad station. The spot, imprinted on every Holocaust documentation, where the prisoners oblivious of the fate that awaited them, were sorted out based on their health, was also chilling to see.

With the Gaza war in full force, it wasn’t possible not to wonder why Israel is behaving the way it is. Most criticism of Israel is centered on the fact that they are repeating the same atrocity that was meted out to them. But after walking through Auschwitz, it’s possible to get a peek into the psyche of the Israeli state. The Holocaust was not merely a product of twentieth-century totalitarianism — it was the culmination of hundreds of years of marginalization, discrimination, and violence against the Jews of Europe. Long before Hitler’s rise, Jews had been portrayed as outsiders and heretics — blamed for plagues, expelled from cities and ghettos, and subjected to forced conversions, pogroms, and economic restrictions. Antisemitism was a part and parcel of every polity – Vienna, Spain, England, czarist Russia – were all anti-Semitic. Shakespeare’s Shylock is probably the most famous caricature of a Jew in all of literature. The Promised Land is not a mythical entity for the Israelis. And this rampant devastation of Gaza with no heed to international law or acknowledgement of the ‘other’ is a manifestation of that belief. (The Arab response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past 7 decades is probably a topic for another day.)

Auschwitz-Birkenau is a must-visit to understand the depravity that the human species is capable of.

The online photo gallery of the museum is also worth browsing through….