Poland-"Arbeit Macht Frei"

Eastern Europe - Poland

July 25, 1996

"Arbeit Macht Frei"

We have heard of the autocracies that took place in the deadly World War II Nazi concentration camps; we have read of the mass extermination of Jews and political prisoners that occurred for five horrific years; but to walk through the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps, to see the barracks, the barbed wire fences, gas chambers and crematorium made real what no history book or movie can. Today Auschwitz, the original extermination camp converted from Polish army barracks, has been preserved as a museum and a memorial to the estimated 1.5 million people from 28 nations who perished at the hands of the SS. The Birkenau camp has been left as it was found. The main entry gate to the Auschwitz camp bears the cynical words "Arbeit Macht Frei" - "Work Brings Freedom" - freedom never planned for those who passed through it.

Visitors to the museum are free to walk about either on their own or with a guide. Various prison blocks have been set up to display the history of the concentration camp and trace the torment of the people who were murdered here. Some blocks display the terrible living and sanitary conditions the prisoners endured, others are lined with documents - proof of the horrible crimes committed, pictures of victims and display cases filled with clothing, hair, shoes and personal belongings discovered when the camps were liberated. People from all over Europe were deported to these camps, many exterminated upon arrival, others forced to become slaves, or to be used for medical experimentation, perishing from hunger, hard labor, punishment or as a result of the appalling sanitary conditions. John and I walked through the halls silently, unable to imagine those who conceived such evil.

It was chilling to learn that all personal effects brought to the camps by the deportees were sorted, stored and subsequently transported to Germany to be used by SS men or even civilians. Warehouses of clothing, glasses and toothbrushes were discovered after the war. To see baby clothes, teeth, bushels of hair taken from the dead and the resulting hair-cloth left me with a sickness in my stomach that remained with me for days.

The eeriest place we walked through was a gas chamber. Here people were told that they would be receiving showers and instead were subjected to deadly Cyclon B. We opted not to visit every prisoner block and every display; it was too emotional. We watched the 15 minute B&W Soviet-made movie in the information area and left to drive 3 km to Birkenau, a much bigger camp covering approximately 425 acres where the total number of prisoners at one point reached 100,000. This is where the greatest number of Jews were exterminated. We overlooked the camp only from the guard tower but its sheer size, the ruins of the enormous gas chambers and crematorium in the back, the rail lines which brought most of the deported Jews from Hungary made us feel, even from a distance, the horror of what had taken place here.