Auschwitz. European trip. Part 3
*** The text and photos below are not advisable to read for too impressionable individuals ***
The next day was special for us, because. we wanted to go to Auschwitz to the concentration camps. I had doubts whether it was worth going there at all. The place is not easy. But, having succumbed to the hustle and bustle of packing, moving and impressions from Krakow, I forgot all my experiences.
Minibuses go from the ill-fated bus station to Auschwitz. Travel around 10 zł . You can take a minibus right on the piron (lower level), or take a ticket at the box office. The road took about an hour.
Auschwitz is a small town with a good railway interchange, one of the reasons why the camps were located here. In fact, there are three concentration camps: Auschwitz 1 (formerly Auschwitz), Auschwitz 2 (Birkenau) and Auschwitz 3. A bus runs between Auschwitz 1 and Birkenau. In memory of the victims of the camp in 1947, Poland created a museum on the grounds of Auschwitz.
The first to visit was Auschwitz 1 (we didn’t go to the third, I don’t know if they visit it at all). When we arrived, people were already gathering near the entrance to the Museum. Entrance is of course free. We took the map of the concentration camp and entered. . .
Auschwitz began its existence as a concentration camp in 1940 on the basis of the former military barracks. As soon as we saw the first brick buildings, fenced with two lines of barbed wire fence, goosebumps ran over our skin. Even now I remember it and I feel uneasy...
"Arbeit macht frei" "Work makes you free". . . Such a sign meets everyone entering the territory. . . and then blocks. . . many blocks. . .
In the first block we visited, there was an urn containing the ashes from the crematorium… Is it worth mentioning whose ashes?!
Many photographs, documents confirming the arrival of thousands of people in concentration camps, fictional reasons for their death in the camps...
I left the first block with the feeling that a knife had been plunged into my heart. A huge number of Israeli tourists with distorted faces went out into the street. One group of such tourists immediately began to pray for the dead.
Then it got harder and harder. Bags of hair, cloth made from human hair, children's toys, sacks and hay on which to sleep, photographs of the dead over the years of their lives. They lived for a month... a month!! ! ((((Evidence of medical experiments and bullying. . .
The fences around the camp were under tension. . .
It was so hard on my soul, by the end of the tour of the first concentration camp, my heart was already aching furiously. You pass all this through yourself, all the grief, all the pain, all the suffering of the dead and the survivors. Even now, when I write, I look at the photo hard and tears well up.
We went to the bus stop, drank water, silently boarded the bus and drove to Birkenau. I was warned that the scale of the second concentration camp would shock me, but I did not think that it would be so much.
From Wikipedia: When Soviet soldiers occupied Auschwitz on January 27.1945, they found about 7.5 thousand surviving prisoners there, and in partially surviving warehouse barracks - 1.185, 345 men's and women's suits, 43.255 pairs of men's and women's shoes, 1.694 carpets, a huge number of toothbrushes and shaving brushes, as well as other small household items. More than 58 thousand prisoners were taken out or killed by the Germans.
Especially for convenience, the railway was completed, called the "road of death"
When our troops entered the city, the Germans tried to destroy their traces, they blew up and fired everything. A few of the barracks survived, and thousands of brick ovens remained in place of the rest...
There seemed to be no end to these pipes. . . they were everywhere. . .
The heart contracted painfully, someone cruelly plunged the knife deeper and deeper into it, and then, as if not satisfied, hacked at it with the fury of a hungry beast...
One of the four blown up crematoria
A monument was erected on the territory of the concentration camp, with warnings in different languages
Near the inscription in Ukrainian, I no longer held tears. I just stood there and cried. And I was not alone. This is a cruel place. . . We must not forget this. When I have my own children and will be in their teens, I will definitely bring them here. I want them to understand what anger, enmity, hatred leads to. . . I want them to honor the past. . .
