concentration camp

The Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps are an hour west of Krakow. Established during Hitler’s reign in the area, the historic sites were designed for the incarceration and extermination of Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals who did not conform to Hitler’s image of an ideal society. UNESCO listed, the vast compound has been preserved as a museum and memorial since 1947 and is the last resting place of many of the victims.

Today, benign in their mute orderly rows, the prisoner dwellings of Auschwitz do well to hide their macabre mechanisms. We are told that until the last days of the concentration camp’s operation in 1945, the German’s worked hard deceiving prisoners who entered the gas chambers of death in ignorance; prisoner details fastidiously recorded in some macabre and perverse sense of order within a world of moral chaos. Local residents, not displaced by the war, were equally ignorant of the real purpose of the camps, seeing only the beautification going on with mass tree plantings around the camp.

“You see, this is how cynical they were. They wanted the place to look nice, while over there they were burning people”, says our guide David, gesturing to a grass covered gas chamber. And he suggests that even until the times of their deaths, prisoners were led to believe that they would survive. “I heard about a prisoner, who was led up the gas chamber and couldn’t work out where she was, because it looked so nice with planter boxes on all of the windows”, he says.

But despite efforts to disguise their activities, we are told that people in the area suspected what was going on. Billowing smoke from Birkenau, the second and much larger camp, gave it away.

“One woman told me that she could see the smoke rising here. People knew what was going on, but they couldn’t say anything, because if they did they’d end up here”, says David.

Constructed with a limited supply of stolen bricks from the homes of displaced Poles, about half of the prisoner’s quarters at Birkenau remain standing today. Un-insulated, a chill rattles through the quarters; almost a whisper from the sad souls who once called this horror home. When bricks ran out, the last dwellings built at Birkenau were crude arrangements of pre-fabricated timber horse stables with dirt floors and brick ovens used for heating. In an ironic twist, most of these concentration camp timber quarters were disassembled and their timbers re-used by locals returning to their home region during the post-war housing crisis. Today, a warped landscape of ruinous chimneys is all that remains.