"The Residence of Death": A Trip through Auschwitz

Auschwitz was the main concentration camp—turned death camp—for Jewish prisoners during WWII, rounded up and forced to work in factories near the camp by the Nazis. We all know the stories, right? This place is horrific. I tried to take as many pictures as I could—and I don’t really consider myself squeamish—but here was a place where I could barely manage to lift my camera.

Walking through the “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” gate was gut-wrenching enough, as it’s such an iconic image of the suffering that happened here, but Marta said I needed to go on the tour to fully understand. I received a small headset that was hooked up to a receiver that hung on a lanyard around my neck, and I followed a tour guide who had a microphone attached to his collar—this way, no one in the tour group could possibly miss any gruesome detail. I told Marta later that I couldn’t understand how anyone could come to work there as a tour guide, day after day, and relive the horrors of this place.

We walked all throughout the small camp that had roughly 30 buildings, and just looking at the place made it seem like the most desolate, depressing place in all of Poland—even having heard none of the stories of what happened here. Seeing the dirt streets, the brick buildings, and the electric fence around the outside perimeter made it feel like the most hopeless place on earth—as the tour guide said, the prisoners weren’t even allowed to sing, as that would inspire hope in the other inmates.

The tour took us through rooms explaining how the gas chamber worked, but that wasn’t all that new to me—that’s the stuff you learn in history class. The issue that seems to be forgotten or looked over here is that these were people, just like you, just like me—they had lives and families and possessions, and those things were all stripped from these people as they were crammed into living quarters unwashed and unfed. The tour guide directly us through several rooms full of the murdered Jews’ possessions. One room was full of the Jews’ luggage, and many of them had written their birth dates on the outside so as to retrieve their belongings after their stay at Auschwitz; some of them had personal messages, love letters and goodbye letters, scribbled across them. Another room was full of shoes from those people. Another room still was filled with eyeglasses—and each pair of spectacles once sat on a person. It was only upon seeing a room filled with the possessions of these murdered people that the magnitude of this place really began to sink in.

The last place we toured in Auschwitz was the actual gas chamber and crematorium. In American history class and on the internet, I had seen pictures of this place, and I had seen the picture of the scratches on the walls inside the chamber; this is another powerful, iconic image from Auschwitz, scratches on the walls of the gas chamber made by human hands. I wanted to take a picture, but again, I couldn’t raise my camera. I touched the scratch marks on the wall, and that’s all I could handle in that room, and I quickly stepped out into the open air again.

From Auschwitz, the tour group was taken by bus to Birkenau, the train station for the original Auschwitz camp and the site of a new, bigger camp than Auschwitz that had the same function—to utilize Jews as a free labor force and eventually kill them all. After murdering this many people, who is it that can think, You know, Auschwitz is working pretty well, so maybe we should build a BIGGER ONE, with a clear conscience and cold blood?

Like I said before, this trip was not enjoyable—but it was very interesting, and it’s necessary. I was talking with the ACN people, and they explained that the Auschwitz/Birkenau tour was a mandatory part of the Norwegian high school experience. I can understand why it would be required, but it almost seems like a high school student wouldn’t make the same connection to this place the way someone older might, like the students wouldn’t understand the gravity, the weight, the importance of this place on a global scale. I know I wouldn’t have, and I’m glad I saw it when I did.