Auschwitz, a nightmare come true!

On one of my trips to Europe, I had the opportunity to meet one of the most famous Nazi concentration camps in the world located in Poland.

Not a nice place to see, and in fact a lot of people asked me why did I go there if it is a place so horrible! As George Santayana said: "Who does not know the history, you risk the lives it again !!"

The tragic history ...

During the 2nd World War II concentration camps, which housed mostly Jews, consistently increased as new European territories were being taken by the Nazi Germany. This was then the largest concentration camp in a lot of 45 other satellite camps. Auschwitz-Birkenau comprised two camps: Auschwitz I, where were the administrative facilities and Auschwitz-Birkenau II, the death camp.

Between 1942 and 1944, about 1.3 million prisoners were murdered, 90% of them Jews, 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Romanian Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, some 400 Jehovah's Witnesses and tens of thousands of people of different nationalities. Who was not executed in the gas chambers died of hunger, infectious diseases, forced labor, individual executions and medical experiments. (1)

On 27 January 1945 the camps were liberated by Soviet troops, this day is celebrated worldwide as the International Day of Holocaust Remembrance. In 1947, Poland created a museum at the site of Auschwitz I and II and in 2002, UNESCO officially declared the ruins of Auschwitz-Birkenau as a World Heritage Site. (1)

Among the nearly 2 million people (controversial numbers), Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, prisoners of war, etc .., only 100,000 persons approx. left the camp, and even most of these did not survive because they were seriously debilitated, reaching weigh twice less than at the time of entry.

Down to hell!
For me the words: "Living hell on earth", never made as much sense as the day I visited the camp and felt upclose the heavy feeling and the smell of death that many still say they feel. There were times when I felt transported to that age and wear the skin of all those people, but I can only imagine how they felt because we will never know for sure how it was ... 
The cold and rainy day completed the sinister atmosphere, a mixture of feelings of anguish and a sense of outrage, anger, disgust, vomiting and even ashamed of what happened here just 60 years ago.
At the entrance, under an iron gate, you can read the sentence: "Arbeit macht frei", in English: "Work makes you free" ... a hypocritical slogan, sure to motivate thousands of prisoners going out every day through this gate to return after several hours of forced labor!

The camp was heavily guarded and escape was impossible. To escape prisioners had to go through two barbed wire fences, patrolled by armed soldiers with orders to kill with rabid dogs ready to shred. At the end they still had to climb a very high wall with watchtowers everywhere.

Those who tried to escape where  severely punished with the death penalty, and the same fate for all those who helped someone escaping. If someone could actually escape would see his family captured and taken to the same field where they would remain until the fugitive to surrender.
The most spectacular escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau took place on June 20, 1942, when three Polish and Ukrainian made a daring escape. The four escaped dressed as SS guards, armed and in an official car, a Steyr 220, stolen from  camp commandant, Rudolph Hoess. The escapees took with them a report about the conditions of the field written by Witold Pilecki. None of them has ever been captured. (1)
The camp was organized in several buildings each with its purpose. Today this building have been transformed into museums and each has a story to tell like: the arrival of prisoners at the camp, life in the camp, selection and extermination process, medical experiments, escapes and riots, etc ...

In one of the buildings we can watch the arrival of prisoners. After severely humiliated, conducted between kicks and punches through the corridors of the buildings they were then observed by doctors and cataloged according to their race and physical condition. The considered unfit for work followed directly to the gas chambers. Those who were considered fit to work, their clothes were torn, their hair cut and were subsequently photographed. Many of these photographs cover the walls of the building. In the last years of the war when the camps were crowded most prisoners did not pass this stage and went directly to the gas chamber.

In other buildings we can witness through documents and material evidence torture and medical experiments that prisoners were subjected.

For me the most dramatic building is the one where  tons of hair, glasses, dentures, shoes, clothes and many other objects belonging to the prisoners where stored!

Everything was recycled. The hair was used to fill the pillows and the  mattresses, iron was recycled just as gold teeth yanked after death, and many other sarcastic details that I'd rather not tell because seeing is believing!

In the last building I remember visiting, functioned as a kind of 3 in 1.  That´s where officers of the allied troops (enemy) were imprisioned, where interrogations took place and also sentences. Usually convicts were executed right there in the alley against a wall.

Auschwitz-Birkenau II, hell is not over! ...
 A time came when the Auschwitz camp became too small to accommodate so many people and there was the need to expand the facilities and this new camp, the place where everything ended ...

Nowadays it is still possible to visit the dorms and latrines, the gas chambers and incinerators were destroyed by the Nazis at the end of the war in a desperate attempt to erase the evidence of such great massacre. In this place there is now a memorial in memory of the victims.

Dorms are no more than a few shacks with wooden bunk beds where they slept 2 or 3 people per bed, pushing and fighting each other for space because there was not much time to sleep. They even sleep with the shoes so they didnt get stolen.

The toilets were located in military stables for horses designed and used by the German military campaign subsequently adapted for that purpose. Each stable prepared for 40 horses, accommodated 400 prisoners without any privacy or hygiene.  The prisoners had only the right to go to the "lavatory" twice a day, and many of them were sick with diphtheria and other intestinal diseases. The smell is said that it was unbearable and that the doors were closed until the military decided to open again. People made the way from the dormitory to the toilets completely naked regardless of weather conditions, noting that the Polish winter temperatures in some areas can reach several degrees below zero.

The feeling was indescribable so i finish my testimony, without more words ...

(1)  wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz-Birkenau