Aushwitz: Part 2

Behind the gas chamber is the gallows where Rudolf Höss was hanged. He was the only person hanged in this gallows.

Höss was given the order by Himmler to devise a method of mass extermination of the European Jews. Höss turned Auschwitz into the most efficient extermination camp in the Reich.

Höss's house is directly behind me. I was unable to take a picture of it. They had fences up and were renovating it. He lived less than 100 feet away from the gas chambers with his wife and children. His wife described Auschwitz as the most beautiful place on earth and said she couldn't imagine living anywhere else.


We weren't allowed to take pictures inside any of the buildings. The buildings all had information and exhibits on Auschwitz. It was inside these buildings that I finally started to understand how many people died there. Piles of shoes, personal effects, and hair was a testament to the number of lives lost. What was even more incredible was the personal effects were only from people executed in the final days of Auschwitz's operation that weren't destroyed by the Nazi's when they left.

At one point during the visits to the exhibits my brain just shut off my emotions. At some points I felt physically ill. I don't have the words to describe the crime that happened and how it felt to be in the place that crime occurred.

Auschwitz and Birkenau

The entrance to Auschwitz. Prisoners were made to march through these gates uner the words "Arbeit macht frei": "Work makes you free." As they marched in and out of the camp an orchestra played music to further humiliate the prisoners.


Auschwitz I was a concentration camp and was created before Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the death camp. The buildings in Aushwitz I are made of brick instead of wood. This is because Aushwitz I was orignally and old Polish Army barraks.


This was the first gas chamber and crematoria, which operated from 1941- 1942, was constructed by converting a bunker. The prisoners were made to strip naked out in front of the gas chamber before they entered. This gas chamber could gas approximately 700 people at one time and was quite small compared to the gas chambers the Nazis later constructed. After the contruction of extermination camps with much larger, more efficent gas chambers, this gas chamber was deconstructed and turned into an air raid shelter for the SS.

Processing Auschwitz

I've been struggling with how to describe my journey to Auschwitz. It's a hard one to tackle, there is of course the simple narrative, but there's also so many feelings I had before, during and after. It's a struggle for me to comprehend all I've seen and come to terms with what I did comprehend. I've also become fascinated with other people's experiences with Auschwitz. It seems like everyone takes something different away with them from the site, but there's also the universal "Oh my God" when the Holocaust stops being just something we read about.

The thing I most connected with were the stories of the people who did good and heroic things in spite of all the horror, for example, Oscar Schindler. This was a man who should have never cared; he was a Nazi, a war profiteer, a run-of-the-mill greedy bastard who only cared about himself. He should have been the last person on earth to look around and go "Hey, this isn't right. I need to help these people." That he went broke saving the lives of Jews astonishes me. A mind boggling number of people turned a blind eye to what was happening, yet the most unlikely of folks risked their lives, safety, family and friends to save fellow humans.

I think in some ways I know I can never comprehend the why's of the evil that happened. That this mass extermination of human beings happened at all is something I will never fully wrap my head around. No matter how many ways it's explained to me I always come back to the same question, "Yes, but why?" This wasn't just a few crazy people doing a few crazy things, this was insanity on an unimaginable scale. Well- organized insanity at that.

I'll be slowly working through my Auschwitz experience over the next few weeks. I hope I ultimately find a coherent way to tell the story.