Visit to Auschwitz

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? Jer 17:9

This verse kept coming into my mind as I walked around Auschwitz. Although you have heard so much about the atrocities of the holocaust, you can never imagine the half of it until you’ve been there. Even then, no doubt you will have only a fraction of a sense of what went on. Man’s inhumanity to man is beyond belief.
What struck me first of all was the size of the place. We were given a 6 hour tour and that was almost six hours of constant walking. We didn’t get to see everything. It’s hard to comprehend the cold-hearted planning that went into the place. You walk in through the infamous gate, over which is written in wrought iron “Arbeit macht frei” (Work brings freedom) and see rows upon rows of sturdy brick buildings. You are taken through exhibition rooms where you can see, behind glass, items taken from the prisoners on arrival, the equivalent of a whole roomful of shoes, piled up to the ceiling. And these were just the ones that remained at the liberation, millions more had already been sent back into Germany.
One display was full of suitcases, bearing the hopeful inscriptions of those who had believed to see them again. All were marked with names, some said “Waisenkind” (orphan). The most horrifying was the display of human hair, some still plaited, which was actually used to make cloth and the baby clothes. Our pupils were silent as they walked around. Many said afterwards that the baby clothes really broke their heart, those and the prosthetic limbs.
We saw horror upon horror: The medical experiments block and the “death block” with its standing cells and between these two blocks the “death wall” where people were shot.

From the first camp, we took a short bus ride to Birkenhau, the “Death Camp”. We entered through the “Death Gate” and walked through some of the wooden huts in which up to 1000 women were kept on 3 storey bunks, 7 to a bed. If you were on the bottom level, you had the rats, those on the top bunk often woke up soaking wet from the rain and those in the middle were beaten by the copal. On the walls were painted signs in German, such as “Verhalte dich ruhig” (Behave yourself quietly).
We passed the gallows where, after the war, they hung the camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, right between the first gas chamber and the house he lived in with his wife and children. Walking inside the gas chamber was a horrible experience.
At the far end of Birkenhau there is an eerie silence. Not even the birds sing here. You can see the hastily destroyed gas chambers and, still intact, the registration block, where room by room, prisoners arrived, were registered and sent to their deaths. There is a display of beautiful happy, family photographs which the prisoners had brought with them. Photographs of holidays, outings and family gatherings. They had no idea then of what lay ahead of them. The display is set on a highly polished floor where the photographs reflect, giving an illusion of there being more. You can read the stories of families and friends and what became of them.
You come out emotionally exhausted and with an overwhelming sense of sadness and horror at what man is capable of, coupled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the fact that you can live and breathe and walk free.