Oświęcim.The town the Nazis renamed Auschwitz.

4th June – 6th June 2024

A journey through this part of Poland would not be complete without coming to the town of Oświęcim (pronounced ‘Osh-vien-chim’), or Auschwitz, as it is better known. The museum and memorial sites of Auschwitz Camp 1, and Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz Camp 2 are not so much ‘tourist attractions’ as they are an essential physical reminder of one of the most heinous episodes in human history and a place that one must come to bear witness. Well that is how we felt, anyway. Up until now we had visited places from which the Third Reich’s ‘undesirables’ (not only Jews, but also political prisoners, Soviet POWs, non-Jewish Poles, Roma and others) had been rounded up and transported away, and read museum exhibits on how they were incarcerated in terrible conditions in concentration camps or exterminated in unimaginable numbers. Now it was time to see the worst of those places in the flesh. A major site of ‘The Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Problem’. A place where so many innocent people were tortured and murdered. It was going to be a sombre experience.

The weather added to the mood. We packed up and left Kraków in the pouring rain which continued for the hour’s journey across country to the modest sized town of Oświecim, and we had checked in, set up camp and had lunch before it started to ease. Our campsite was the large and well tended lawn area surrounding the ‘Prayer and Dialogue Centre’. This provides affordable rooms and food, conference and meeting rooms to groups large and small, providing a multi-denominational space for discussion and reflection. We had an English language tour of Auschwitz booked for early afternoon and the entrance to the museum was only 1.5km walk from here. The rain fortuitously stopped as it came time for us to set off, but the cloudy gloom persisted.

There were understandably many people visiting the site and except for early in the morning and at the end of the day, all visitors have to join a tour. The groups were about 15-20 people each, so it was still quite intimate and we managed to get some photos without other visitors in them. Our guide, Christoph, was a serious chap of about 35 who delivered his deadpan narration in accented English via a transponder and headsets. I wondered whether doing a couple of tours of Auschwitz a day attracts the serious, whether it creates a level of seriousness in a person, or whether he wasn’t serious at all but that the job requires the appearance of seriousness. Probably a degree of all three.

The original camp, Auschwitz 1, is suprisingly close to the town of Oświęcim. Selected by the Nazis as an excellent location for their purposes, this pre-existing Polish army camp was central to the area of Europe they were hoping to ‘cleanse’ and it had much of the infrastructure they needed already in place. The much bigger Aushwitz camp 2, 2km away in Birkenau was later constructed from scratch once their operation had grown. There was a third camp in Monowice, 12km away that provided forced labour in a rubber factory. The museum is not traditional in the sense of being a building full of exhibits, but uses the space of the camps themselves to tell the story. This is aided by the knowledge of the guides, a judicious selection of amazing large scale photos, collections of the possesions of the victims such as shoes and suitcases, and the most macbre of all, a huge pile of human hair, removed after death. The long hair had a monetary value as it was sold to carpet and mattress makers. Gold teeth were also looted from the dead. One of the most moving exhibits was an urn containing a small sample of the mixed ashes taken from the enormous stockpile found here after the liberation of the camp.

In Auschwitz Camp 1 most of the deaths were caused by starvation and overwork, illness and death penalties metered out for ‘crimes’, such as someone else trying to escape. The unimaginable, large scale extermination of victims occurred at Camp 2, Birkenau. To be stood on the tracks where the trains pulled in, to be present in the space where hundreds of thousands of exhausted, hungry, terrified men, women and children poured off the putrid box cars to be lined up and go through ‘selection’ (by qualified doctors) where it was decided whether they were fit enough be worked to death or to go straight to the gas chamber, to see the ruins of the chambers and incinerators themselves, to experience the sheer scale of the place, it was overwhelming. If I believed in ghosts, the air would have be filled with a million silent screams.

Everyone should come here. However you feel about the holocaust, the reality of what happened here cannot be minimised or ignored or rewritten. Its history needs to stay alive to help humanity from repeating its horror, although it continues be be apparent that some humans seem to be incapable of compassion and empathy towards their fellow man.

We stayed an extra day here, enjoying the serene space of the Prayer and Dialogue centre gardens and soaking up the warmth of the returned sunshine, letting it dry everything out after the rain of the day before. We also took some time to cycle into the town centre of Oświęcim which is an otherwise normal town, occupied by normal people living normal lives. I wonder what it’s like to have a place like Auschwitz, and all its infamy, right on the doorstep?

A few days after we left Oświęcim we watched the 2023 movie Zone Of Interest. This is based on the family life of the Nazi Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolph Höss, his wife, Hedwig and their five children The family lived a fairly idyllic existance in a large house right next to the camp. So much of the movie was based on truth and fact and many of the details resonnated very loudly for us having so recently been on ‘the other side of the wall’ and knowing what we now knew. Their original house still exists as a private residence, although was not used for the filming due to its age. It was pointed out to us on our tour where we could see its roof from the location we were standing in the camp, the specially built gallows where Höss was executed for war crimes in April 1947.

We continue our travels and continue living our lucky lives even more aware and cognisant that happiness, health, peace, freedom and love should not be taken for granted.