1,100,000 people, gone

Thursday was an intense day. When I arrived in Krakow, I learned that Auschwitz, the most infamous of all the concentration camps, was located not more than 60 km away.

I went not expecting to learn that much that was new. Having been to Holocaust museums in various places, including most recently in Jerusalem, I knew what occurred in those places. Rather, I think I went because I felt it important to go, to bear witness in some abstract retrospective sense.

The Auschwitz I camp, the smaller of the two, is where the majority of the museum exhibits are located. There, many, many artifacts of the many, many people that passed through are on display to give some bit of sense of the scale of the inhumanity that occurred. So many shoes, so many suitcases, so much hair.

But it was Auschwitz II, at Birkenau, that really made me pause. The place was so big, and so barren. The largely wooden barracks had all disappeared except for their brick chimneys (and the few that had been restored). The conditions so inhumane, with people piled on top of one another, given nowhere near enough food to live, and forced to do back-breaking physical labor that served no point. Beyond that were the crematoria, where the mass murder of people from all over Europe occurred. Of 1,300,000 people that entered the Auschwitz complex as prisoners, 1,100,000 were murdered. Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners, and others.

The memorial captured it right for me when it said, in 20+ languages:

For ever 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

As I was walking out, I couldn't help but pause and peer down the railway track that led into this awful place of such inhuman acts.