We walked as a small group so that the tour guides voice could be kept low and respectful. This camp is the previous soldiers barracks of the Polish army and so when you are there, you will see brick barracks and wide streets with a compound taken care of as if little old cleaning ladies had love for their land. The only thing that looks out of place is the barbed wire fencing attached to large concrete pillars and the absence of gates to get out. Things to you, at first glance, appear to resemble a prison that any one of us would see out in the country
somewhere.
There were two Auschwitz camps - no. 1 and 2. Number 2 was almost totally destroyed just after the war by the Nazis themselves in order to try and destroy any evidence of wrong doings or any people left to tell the story. We were at No. 1.
Just so you know, the commanding officer lived (with his wife and 5 children) in one of 3 of the only barracks or mansions to be outside the gate, and later after the war when he was accused of his crimes against humanity, he was brought back to the same camp and hanged. Also something else that we didn't know was that Bayer, the drug company at that time, was paying the Nazi commanders to test and use the drugs from Bayer on the prisoners.
We walked through all the barracks where first they showed us how people were stacked into the rooms and forced to sleep on hay, or in punishment, forced through a small hole at floor level into a small boxed-in-area, the size of a telephone booth, to stand together with no food or air for sometimes up to 12 days. Many people died during this time and for no other reasons than that they didn't rise at the proper time to work.
We watched photo after photo of how people who came off the trains into the compound and then got separated into two groups. One group, women, children and the elderly, were told to leave their 1 suitcase and proceed into the area where they could shower and would be moved to another place. This is where they were collected and gassed -later to be burned or buried into mass graves. The other group, the healthy looking ones, we're kept for working.
We were told to walk slowly and softly because you would never know what we were walking on as many of he mass graves were just placed all throughout the compound and then covered up again.
In each of the camps there was one barrack that was called "Kanada 1 and Kanada 2."
Why call it Kanada? Europe believed that at that time Kanada was the best and most affluent place to live in the world. So barracks full of items that would later be used for aiding the German public was seen as a windfall. This belief was one of the main reasons why people came in droves to move into Canada for a better life.
The number 2 barracks at another camp was burned just before liberation to hide the crimes but the number 1 barracks was saved. In each of these barracks were put the belongings of all the suitcases. These belongings would then eventually be sent to Germany to be used for the people. We saw room after room of shoes - so many shoes. We saw room after room of suitcases - so many suitcases, each with the prisoner's name, age, place of birth and religion on the front. We saw rooms filled with men and women's brushes, combs and mirrors. We saw rooms filled with spectacles, clothes and body braces, therapeutic shoes and prosthetics. All this left us dumbfounded and speechless but the worst was, and I'll never forget it, the rooms full of real human hair, either shaven, ripped off or scalped from the prisoners and then sewn together and sent for use in knitting, wigs or other functions. You could tell very easily the age of the people from whom the hair had come. The soft looking, gentle
colours were from children, the grey and streaked were from the elderly and the browns, blacks and rarely a blonde were from the young women and men.
We saw the gas chambers, held in the underground areas of the barracks, where we walked along the close corridors and got to peek into the eye hole of each area. It was dark, tight and up to 200 people were placed at once into the little prison cells the size of a small bedroom. We then viewed the chambers where all the bodies were cremated.
Two things I shall remember for ever: one is the hair and the other is the shooting wall that is still up against the compound wall in the area between the the gas chambers and the prison barracks. The people were walked out, told to turn around and put their hands up in the air and touch the wall and then they were shot, usually in the head.
It was here that, after everyone had left the compound and just G and I were there still at the wall, I picked up a small pebble and added it into a small hole that seemed to have been a hole created from too many bullets hitting in the same spot. It was about head level.
As a group, we didn't talk at all. Some people left, lots cried but most of us solemnly walked through the bldgs and entered the bus quietly.
