RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: The Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination complex - The place where civilization stopped  Sun Aug 08, 2010 2:02 am | |
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YOU CAN read hundreds of books about the Nazis but nothing will prepare you for the experience of visiting the Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination complex in Poland.
Poles I met are concerned about the fact that some media call these camps Polish, not German. They are at pains to explain this is a blood libel on Poland. The acts of murderous depravity performed in the camps by Nazis, including unspeakable medical "experiments", leave one at the frontier of language, so names and adjectives become important.
I was there with thousands of tourists. Many visitors and buses give this – for a queasy moment – a bizarre, sick, theme park-of-death feeling at $10 a ticket.
Auschwitz, built as a Polish army garrison before the Second World War, was small in scale when SS officers started gassing and then cremating Jewish men, women and children, homosexuals, Poles, political prisoners and anyone they didn't like. The elements of sadism and incalculable cruelty permeate this place where Western civilisation stopped for too long.
The "wall of death" is where thousands were shot, then cremated. The “tour” includes a brisk (not fast enough) walk through a gas chamber, which opens immediately on to a crematorium where bodies were shunted into the ovens by metal contraptions out of a low-budget horror movie. A sign in the gas chamber says keep the noise down out of respect for the dead.
Locals tell me their relatives knew what was going on under Nazi control – the smell of burning humans was pervasive. Prisoners regularly killed themselves by throwing themselves on the electrified fences.
In an example of the mentality of the Nazis, they had a prisoner orchestra play when they marched victims into the gas chamber, so those about to be murdered would not be alarmed.
All this pales compared with the staggering size of the Birkenau complex, just minutes away. The Nazis figured out how to gas people and burn them within minutes in Auschwitz. Birkenau is genocide-turned-industrial.
The complex is so big you cannot see where it ends in bright sunlight. Hundreds of barracks and buildings surround a long railway platform that leads to four huge killing buildings. The ruins remain, incompetently blown up by fleeing SS men.
After function was perfected in Auschwitz, the buildings contained three distinct parts. First, the room where victims were told to undress; second, the gas chamber; and third, the ovens where 2500 bodies could be stacked in one burning.
An addendum tells the real story: a side oven burned the skulls to melt gold in the victims' teeth. The Holocaust was the basest of robberies, with the victims killed as the final act of perversion. Dressed up in theories of the master race and quack eugenics, the Nazis simply wanted the money.
It was a bright, sunny day. It helped get through this heartbreaking geography of indescribable horror. I heard visitors speak German. In this context it was jarring. Then I heard Australian accents and felt my spirits improve. It is an accent without baggage. I have close German friends and they suffer this history; it was the previous generation that did the incomprehensible.
That word, incomprehensible, has almost visceral meaning at this saddest of sad spots. It is the displayed photos of little children being led to a gas chamber that increases anger; murder the children, steal the parents' gold. Hitler's dentist got his gold from SS chief Heinrich Himmler. A London Telegraph report that Hitler's teeth were filled with his victims' gold just about sums up the perversity of the Third Reich.
The next day at nearby Wroclaw the city archive kindly provided me with 200 documents about some of my lost relatives. In excruciating detail, Nazi bureaucrats had gone through the financial affairs of Ilse, Charlotte and Fritz Morawski. They had inserted Sara and Israel as middle names for my grandparents Sophie and Max Morawski, who escaped to America. The others probably perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau. I will find out.
LNK |
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