Post by yenilira on Feb 16, 2011 1:51:07 GMT 1
The very mention of this place still sends the shivers up one’s back, even today, despite it now just being a museum, but not a ‘museum’ in the sense of the word that most associate with in those terms today.
This ‘museum’ is out in the open, which gives it its air of menace and enhances its grimness, especially on a dull day.
Situated on the south side of the Oœwiêcim to Bielsko-Biala National Road 933, in the suburbs of the former, it is about an hour’s drive from Krakow, in southwest Poland.
It can be easily reached by train or local bus.
Borne out of initially being an army transit camp, which in turn became a political prison for Poles, it was expanded to a capacity of 130,000 to function as a labour camp in 1941.
Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss (in English, Hoess) oversaw the development of the camp and served as the first commandant, and was overall commandant of the Auschwitz complex from May 1940 to November 1943;
SS-Obersturmführer Josef Kramer was appointed Höss's deputy.
Ironically, Höss was executed on April 16, 1947 in front of the site of the Gestapo building at Auschwitz which was right next to the Krema I gas chamber in the main camp.
In 1942, it became the biggest centre for the mass extermination of European Jews, the majority deported there being killed immediately on arrival in the gas chambers, without registration or identification, hence the difficulty in determining precisely the numbers murdered there.
Notes: By mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz, where extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with some estimates running as high as three million persons eventually killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning ...
Between May 14 and July 8,1944, 437,402 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in 148 trains. This was probably the largest single mass deportation during the Holocaust.
The most infamous of camp doctors there was the notorious Josef Mengele, nicknamed the 'Angel of Death' for the inhuman experiments he conducted in Block 10.
When my wife and I visited it a few years back, we had just come from the site of the largest of the Ghettos in the then Nazi-occupied Europe, and the Pawiak Prison – both in Warsaw. The latter building, an eerie, forbidding place.
It took us half a day to get round Auschwitz 1 -
an experience we’d never forget.
Barrack-block-type buildings, which previously housed the prisoners, contain various articles taken from those who passed under the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign over the iron gate entrance – secured behind large glass panels the whole length in separate buildings - were glasses, teeth, suitcases, hair, various items of clothing, prams, prayer shawls, brushes of all descriptions, toys, prosthetics and crutches, amongst many other things.
Today, it is still possible to discern the remnants of the underground changing rooms, watch towers, the gas chambers, the furnaces, the body carts, the crematoriums, the ovens and the “Sauna”, together with the barbed wire.
Many of the visitors are Israeli schoolchildren, in fact there were two groups going round at the same time as us: suitably-dressed, very sombre, and each leader carrying the flag of their country. In one block, it was the one displaying the human hair: a woman took one step inside, saw what was there, and straight away gagged, and had to be helped out into the fresh air.
The smell of death is everywhere, even in blocks with just pictures of those incarcerated in that place.
It can be described as very unsettling, but it is the one place in the world that I say one should go to visit, if only to bear witness to the inhumanity of one man and the monstrosity of genocide.
Last year, there were over 1,380,000 visitors - a record for the museum in the more than sixty years of its existence.
It’s a chilling but priceless historical lesson for this and future generations, lest humanity otherwise forget.
Save Auschwitz.
www.auschwitz.org.pl/
Thank You,
YL.
This ‘museum’ is out in the open, which gives it its air of menace and enhances its grimness, especially on a dull day.
Situated on the south side of the Oœwiêcim to Bielsko-Biala National Road 933, in the suburbs of the former, it is about an hour’s drive from Krakow, in southwest Poland.
It can be easily reached by train or local bus.
Borne out of initially being an army transit camp, which in turn became a political prison for Poles, it was expanded to a capacity of 130,000 to function as a labour camp in 1941.
Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss (in English, Hoess) oversaw the development of the camp and served as the first commandant, and was overall commandant of the Auschwitz complex from May 1940 to November 1943;
SS-Obersturmführer Josef Kramer was appointed Höss's deputy.
Ironically, Höss was executed on April 16, 1947 in front of the site of the Gestapo building at Auschwitz which was right next to the Krema I gas chamber in the main camp.
In 1942, it became the biggest centre for the mass extermination of European Jews, the majority deported there being killed immediately on arrival in the gas chambers, without registration or identification, hence the difficulty in determining precisely the numbers murdered there.
Notes: By mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz, where extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with some estimates running as high as three million persons eventually killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning ...
Between May 14 and July 8,1944, 437,402 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in 148 trains. This was probably the largest single mass deportation during the Holocaust.
The most infamous of camp doctors there was the notorious Josef Mengele, nicknamed the 'Angel of Death' for the inhuman experiments he conducted in Block 10.
When my wife and I visited it a few years back, we had just come from the site of the largest of the Ghettos in the then Nazi-occupied Europe, and the Pawiak Prison – both in Warsaw. The latter building, an eerie, forbidding place.
It took us half a day to get round Auschwitz 1 -
an experience we’d never forget.
Barrack-block-type buildings, which previously housed the prisoners, contain various articles taken from those who passed under the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign over the iron gate entrance – secured behind large glass panels the whole length in separate buildings - were glasses, teeth, suitcases, hair, various items of clothing, prams, prayer shawls, brushes of all descriptions, toys, prosthetics and crutches, amongst many other things.
Today, it is still possible to discern the remnants of the underground changing rooms, watch towers, the gas chambers, the furnaces, the body carts, the crematoriums, the ovens and the “Sauna”, together with the barbed wire.
Many of the visitors are Israeli schoolchildren, in fact there were two groups going round at the same time as us: suitably-dressed, very sombre, and each leader carrying the flag of their country. In one block, it was the one displaying the human hair: a woman took one step inside, saw what was there, and straight away gagged, and had to be helped out into the fresh air.
The smell of death is everywhere, even in blocks with just pictures of those incarcerated in that place.
It can be described as very unsettling, but it is the one place in the world that I say one should go to visit, if only to bear witness to the inhumanity of one man and the monstrosity of genocide.
Last year, there were over 1,380,000 visitors - a record for the museum in the more than sixty years of its existence.
It’s a chilling but priceless historical lesson for this and future generations, lest humanity otherwise forget.
Save Auschwitz.
www.auschwitz.org.pl/
Thank You,
YL.