Evil
The snow falling did not lighten the mood at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nothing could, or should.
We leave here quietly with more questions than answers. We are not exactly glad we came, but we agree it had to be done. How could a leader plan this diabolic and horrible business. How could so many people in so many different positions go along with it?
The desperation by German SS soldiers to destroy the evidence as the Soviet shock troops approached was clear. The scale of the operation would partially foil their efforts. Although only a small percentage of personal effects and documents remained, it was enough to tell the story. There are always survivors, witnesses or evidence to any atrocity. In this case, the will to pass along the story for generations was and remains strong. There were many secret notes, pictures, documents-- some hidden, some found recently, some passed along, handed down.
There were many school kids walking together on field trips. We saw them walking past the selection point and towards the memorial at Birkenau. Taking pictures along the tracks. Not much older than John. The standard Polish curriculum requires students to tour the grounds at age 14-15, during the first year of their high school.
In the 1990’s and early 2000’s around 100,000 people toured the sites per year. In 2004, after joining the EU, they started to experience over 1 million visitors per year, and so far in 2017 they have hosted over 2 million visitors.
The old Schindler Factory in Krakow is now a museum featuring a timeline of Krakow 1939-1945. Nazi forethought of organized destruction is self-evident. First the intellectuals, leaders of the resistance, and the potential leaders of resistance were rounded up and placed in the work camps. Due to working and living conditions, most would die within 6-18 months. All the schools were closed. No need for culture or learning, the Poles would be good for one, maybe two generations as laborers. The master race would resettle these lands and prosper as a full-fledged member of the Thousand Year Reich. The Jews were herded into a ghetto, then transported for extermination. There is no delicate way to talk about this subject.
The infamous, paradoxical phrase over the main gate at Auschwitz, "Work will set you free."
John and our guide are standing at the selection point in Birkenau next to an authentic box car. While Auschwitz was a form Polish army barracks, and thus relatively comfortable, the Auschwitz prisoners built Birkenau camp 4X as big and shelters were made to the spec of the German horse stable, barely able to keep the weather out. 80% of the Jews that arrived went straight to the gas chamber, only the strongest, capable of work and surviving the conditions were sent to real showers and issued striped camp clothing.
Monument at Birkenau. The approach they used at Auschwitz was to create a museum environment with articles, personal effects, etc. At Birkenau the objective was to leave it entirely as the Soviets found it when they liberated the camp. With so many visitors coming, they felt like there should be one place where visitors can pause, reflect and collect their thoughts. This was what the came up with. There are tablets written in more than 20 languages at the base of the monument.
"Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women and children, mainly Jews from various countries of Europe. Auschwitz-Birkenau 1940-1945
At the very end of the Schindler Museum there were two books. Our guide kept saying how extreme times brought out the best and the worst in people...on both sides. Many examples of evil and good were recorded in the respective books.
Our guide had John look through the directory for two particular names. Their stories were amazing examples of love for their fellow human beings, demonstrated at great danger to themselves and their families.
80,000 shoes. And these are just the ones that were not already sent back to Germany as the normal course of weekly business, or destroyed as the Soviets approached.