Auschwitz today is a term associated with the Holocaust and with the many atrocities that Nazi Germany committed against humankind, but Auschwitz, the prison camp, was an entity, a working world in which died an estimated four million people, ninety percent of whom were Jews, and one million children. The prison complex, located in Oswiecem, Poland, was only one of five Nazi Death Camps, but it was the largest, the most feared, and--by virtue of the incredible stories written by its survivors--the most infamous.
Following the invasion of Poland on the first of September, 1939, the camp held members of the Polish resistance led by intellectuals and the Catholic church, and Orthodox Galician Jews who refused to conform to Nazi racial laws. After the summer of 1941, when the German Reich launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, the composition of prisoners at the camp changed as mass numbers of Soviet military prisoners were shipped in from the advancing Eastern Front. Soldiers of the Red Army occupied the lowest rung of the heirarchal camp ladder and many, due to the "Commisar's Order," which became the Ślegal' basis for the murder of millions of Soviet prisoners of war, did not survive transport to Auschwitz. They were either secretly shot or left to starve in rural holding stations.
Nevertheless, by the end of 1941, the facilities at Auschwitz were so burdened by overcrowding and its resulting poor sanitation and disease that a second camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, was established on a flat, swampy stretch of land three kilometers away. Birkenau was soon transformed into an extermination camp to which shipments of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled persons, and opponents of Nazi occupation from all over Europe were sent following the Wannsee Conference of January, 1942. From this date on, Nazi Germany actively sought to liquidate the European Jewish population as the "Final Solution" of the "Jewish Question" and, in the end, succeeded in destroying two-thirds of the pre-war population.
When each new rail car arrived at Birkenau, SS (Schutzstafe--protection squad) guards
divided the occupants into two lines based on physical condition. Prisoners who were not
strong enough to endure punishing physical labor in the nearby quarries and mines were
immediately sent to the gas chambers. Most were women and children. Camp doctors
and guards continually inspected prisoners as well, and at each roll call a new batch of the
weak and diseased were pulled from rank and sent to their death.
As I walked through the gate at Birkenau, dubbed by inmates the "Gate of Death," and stepped along the rails, the wind humming eerily in my ears, numbers rolled around in my head. Things that are organized by denominations of a million defy my imagination-- Twenty-five million, the number of human lives that the Soviet Union alone lost in the second World War, is an abstract sum that holds no meaning. My eyes scanned the horizon. Shells of barracks and their chimneys as far as I could see. Guards used them to store the material goods taken from each prisoner upon arrival. The SS burned all but ten of these warehouses before they abandoned the camp, and all of the exhibits located in the main camp were salvaged from these remaining stores. I looked down at the wet grass and remembered the collection of baby clothes; the mounds and mounds of human hair; the multitude of shaving brushes, toothbrushes, and hair combs; the piles of battered shoes of all shapes and sizes. I had passed the long glass windows in the main camp, displaying all of these things. I had glanced over a wall of inmate mug-shots of fatigued, emaciated faces. I had toured a renovated crematorium and touched the large, heavy bolt to the Śshower' door. I had seen with my own eyes the inscription "M.FRANK- HOLLAND" on one of many beaten suitcases. Walking across the flat, treeless plain, my feet sinking in the soft earth, what had seemed unimaginable now became more real.
Looking over the barren landscape, arms crossed about my chest for warmth, I thought
back on my own life experience. A gulf of time separates my generation from the
Holocaust. We live in a different world, a different culture, but in one that was determined
by the events of the second World War. In this way, Auschwitz is not only a monument
to the many individuals who perished innocently as a result of Nazi racial doctrine, but it
is also a reminder to all people of the universal capacity of humankind to inflict terror on
itself.
"Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at dusk and at daybreak we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eye is blue
he shoots you with bullets of lead his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his hounds on us he gives us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and dreams death is a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamite"
-excerpt from "Death Fugue" by Paul Celan
"Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died."
-excerpt from "Campo dei Fiori" by Czeslaw Milosz
"But still we continue to long for a world in which there is love between men, peace, and serene deliverance from our baser instincts." -From "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" by Tadeusz Borowski
"I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see a world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever- approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again." -Excerpt from the "Diary of Anne Frank" dated 15 July 1944