In the photo: the Auschwitz gallows (Photo A. Stella)
When returning from a trip the most frequent question is: “Was it nice?”. At that point those who have traveled respond according to their own subjectivity, a factor which however disappears if one is returning from a visit to the concentration and extermination camps between Auschwitz 1 and Birkenau. Why not, going to Auschwitz is not and can never be nice. Maybe it’s just simply necessary, an experience to have to see with your own eyes what has been and above all to not forget the worst page in the history of humanity. The History with a capital “S” of the Second World War actually began in 1940 and ended on January 27, 1945, in that great desolate land located in Western Poland. And eighty years after its epilogue, in a current historical period where peace does not seem to be a priority, memory takes on a fundamental value.
Auschwitz 1, a methodical death machine
The Polish winter is harsh, the thermometer reads three degrees and the sun peeks out from the gray clouds only in rare moments. In the previous days it snowed a lot and this element contributes to making the visit to Auschwitz 1 even more special – the first concentration camp complex built in Poland and operational since 1940 – which can only be accessed after long checks. The journey does not begin by crossing one of the famous gates of the concentration camp. First there is a long corridor, surrounded by high walls, in the open air to walk through. About three minutes of walking during which, in the most absolute silence, only one voice resounds. Low, almost shuffling, but incessant. It lists the names of some of the numerous people who lost their lives in that place, leading the visitor to immediately focus on the extent of the extermination perpetrated. A few steps and you reach the sadly well-known entrance gate, dominated by three German words: Arbeit macht frei. Work sets you free. The mocking phrase engraved by the will of the SS major, Rudolf Hoss, commander of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Once you enter the entrance the impact is immediate. Many small brick structures placed strictly in rows, in the middle of tree-lined avenues, like the terraced houses of a small provincial town. And instead in those barracks the worst atrocities were committed against millions of human beings. Jews, especially since 1942 – around one and a half million died in Auschwitz due to the Final Solution project – but not only. Initially the camps “hosted” thousands of Polish and later also Russian political dissidents. Swithout forgetting the silent and ignored massacre of 21 thousand Sinti and Roma.
The shoes of the deportees (Photo: A. Stella)
On the door of the first room visited, which houses the photographic exhibition, stands a maxim by the Spanish philosopher George Santayana: «Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it». A warning that is more timely and unheeded than ever. The exposition is minimal, crude and sweeps away any attempt at positive imagination. Entire rooms – on whose walls hang photos of the prisoners taken by the Nazis themselves and found by the Russians after the liberation – contain thousands of artefacts belonging to the deportees. Suitcases with names and dates of birth on them, prosthetics, glasses, brushes, baby kits, shoes and pots and pans. Objects confiscated from their owners upon arrival at the camp, with the false promise of being returned after selection and the so-called “shower” in the gas chambers. Continuously in and out of the barracks leads to the final rooms of the exhibition which contain two of the symbols of the Holocaust. The “Zyklon B” gas cans. Piles of apparently harmless cans, inside which the lethal weapon was hidden. And then the hair. Now grayed by time. Belonged and cut to all those who entered the camp and then preserved. At the end of the war, 7,000 kilograms of human hair were found. 7,000 kilos of hair, one of the distinctive traits of a human’s physical personality, used by the Germans to build pylons.
If the exhibition of block 5 gives the first heavy glimpse of the physical and psychological annihilation of a man, blocks 7, 11 and the underground tell of the rapid passage towards death. We start from the dormitories, rooms with a maximum capacity of 50 prisoners and which instead contained 200. A series of bunk beds with two or three floors, made of wooden planks and covered with straw when you were lucky. The blankets, threadbare rags, cut and not suitable for winter temperatures, represented almost an absolute luxury. In an anguished “Rossinian crescendo” we move on to block 11, the block of death. On the walls of the corridor that passes between the cells – those located on the surface and used as accommodation for deportees awaiting summary trial – other photos are hung. Single faces. With cut hair and a look somewhere between absent and suffering. Men, women, children and the elderly. All dead. Or of hardship and illness or shot against a gray wall, located in the courtyard in front. Their gaze almost seems to condemn those passing in the corridor. Especially in that moment you try to identify with their condition (especially looking at the faces of kids who are younger than the writer or at most the same age, ed.), but it’s almost impossible. Visitors to this place wear heavy, comfortable clothing in winter, while at the time prisoners only wore light tunics. This prevents the slightest comparison. The descent into the underground finally opens the gates of hell. Small cells of 3×3 meters, used for “bunker cleaning”. Here the deportees suffered the worst end. In cell 18 – where the Polish priest Maksymilian Kolbe was also locked up, who sacrificed his life to save that of another inmate – one was destined to die of hunger. In cell 20, however, people lost their lives due to lack of air. Once you went down into the underground it was difficult to go back up again.
The tour inside Auschwitz 1 ends at a symbolic point. Within a few meters there is a gas chamber, a gallows and behind the barbed wire, in what was considered the “free world”, a villa with a red roof. The villa where Rudolf Hoss, the aforementioned commander of the Polish concentration camps, lived with his family. The gas chamber – the only one left intact between Auschwitz and Birkenau (all the others were destroyed by the Germans shortly before the liberation of the camps, in order to uselessly erase the traces of the horrors) – where the Zyklon B gas chosen from the by Hoss himself to speed up kills. And the passage through its narrow and dark spaces, between ovens on display and trap doors on the roof, is the last shock to the soul during the visit to the camp. And finally the gallows, made up of three steps and three wooden planks, built and used on 16 April 1947 only to hang the German commander himself, sentenced to death.
In the photo: the train tracks in Birkenau (Photo A. Stella)
Birkenau, among indelible rubble and endless streets
Just three kilometers from Auschwitz 1 here is Birkenau. From a concentration camp to an extermination camp. The largest extermination camp ever built, with a maximum capacity of 100,000 prisoners. The visit here is very different and much shorter. If Auschwitz is the place where you can concretely see the traces of Nazi horror, Birkenau is the place to reflectwhile walking along very long avenues dotted with the rubble of gas chambers and crematoriums and covered in snow. A trace of death, however, destined to remain indelible. However, what resists the passage of time are the tracks of the railway yard, on which the trains full of deportees arrived. At the end of the tracks, still surrounded by other rubble, is the International Monument in Memory of the Victims of Nazifascism. A terribly perfect symbol of what the end of that train journey represented.
The last stage of the tour coincides with the entrance to one of the few shacks left standing. Low roof with leaks, muddy floor without boards and no artificial light source. A faithful reproduction of the environment where the prisoners were crowded together, forced, as in Auschwitz 1, to sleep on bunk beds made of wooden planks. Maximum capacity: 100 people. Number of actual attendees: 400 people. Forced to lie one on top of the other, in what were originally field stables for 52 horses.
Leaving Birkenau, it feels like leaving the center of the world’s evil. A few meters later, around a corner on the road back to Krakow, there is a shopping center and a McDonald’s, symbols of consumerism and Western life today. Humanity has gone beyond the Second World War, beyond Auschwitz and the extermination of the Jews. But the two fields are there, in their sad immensity, always reminding everyone of the value of memory.
