Imagine, please, the idyllic natural landscape of Central Europe – old forests, wide blue rivers, green fields, and hills of Southern Poland. What fantastic natural beauty. I promise, you will fall in love with this in a few minutes...
But, stop. Where has this screaming horrific feeling come from? Oh, yes, I forgot, we are approaching the biggest Nazis concentrate camp – Auschwitz-Birkenau...
Entering the main gates of Birkenau, called The Gates of Death. The cattle cars full of people came through these gates... Of course, they left empty... From the top of these Gates is a wide panorama of Birkenau - 175 hectares of Death City, divided into districts, commanded once by Nazis officers... Gas chambers, four crematoriums, and many barracks in a geometrically planned City. Maybe, this is the biggest cemetery in the world – approximately 1.5 million people are buried in a few hundred square meters here...
I was standing there and thinking: Who did this? Maybe some wild tribes from Africa? No. It was done by one of the most well-educated and civilized nations in the world. Maybe it happened during the dark Middle Ages... No. It was in Europe only 70 years ago...
To be honest, I would like to forget these memories from Auschwitz, go away and not visit this place any more... Have you ever see the barracks were the prisoners of Auschwitz lived? They are about 20 meters long and 5 meters wide. They were made from boards from the nearby villages, on the ground with no basement... So, after rains and melted snow they were swamped with mud. Prisoners used nearby pits in the ground as toilets: Can you imagine how the defecation of hundreds of people smells? Everything was made to show them that they are no longer people...
- How many prisoners slept on one 2-meter-long shelf?, - asked the tour guide.
- Try to guess...
- I think a maximum of 10.
- Umm, no, about 15-20... Some were sleeping on a ground shelf, naturally on the damp earth... After few weeks here they were so thin, like ghosts – only skin and bones... Can you imagine – one woman came here in the beginning of 1945. She was 55 kg. After few weeks, 28 kg...
We are walking near the gas chamber. Imagine – mothers with there children, mostly Jews, came here. All of them were transported in cattle cars, separated from their husbands and brothers. They were very tired... They believed the Nazis promises that they would take a shower and then be settled in. They expected to be resettled on the uninhabited Eastern territories. Mothers and their children took off their clothes. The mother's were ashamed to be naked near their children, so they hurried up to go to the shower. They entered a shower room, the door closed, but instead of water they get Zyklon B gas...
The crematoriums were working 24 hours a day. There pipes were overheating, so corpses were buried behind the nearby little forest. This soil is generously fertilized with the people's ash – according to the Nazis plans.
I don't want to come here any more, but I feel that it's too dangerous to forget these impressions, to wipe this experience from the people’s memory...
I Tymots, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland
