Auschwitz One Continued...

After the building with the possessions of the prisoners in, we saw block 10, the building where doctors used victims to do cruel experiments on, most infamously by Josef Mengele.

Following this, we went inside block 11. This was the torture block, often called a ‘prison within a prison’. In here we saw the horrendous conditions victims were put into as punishment for committing crimes such as being late for roll call. There were different cells for different methods of torture, for example we saw standing cells, where several prisoners were put in a small enclosed space with only room to stand up for multiple days and nights. We also saw the former starvation and suffocation cells, and in the yard outside was the ‘death wall’, against which executions by shooting took place. Most of the victims of block 11 were already weak with hunger and exhaustion through the work they were being forced to do and the conditions they were living under, so many died from the torture carried out in the cells.

Further around the camp, we saw Auschwitz One’s former gas chamber. Walking inside the cold grey building, it was impossible not to imagine all the people who had walked there before us seventy years ago. Our group entered in silence and judging by the tension and emotion in the air I think everyone else was going through what I was, because it was very difficult to know what to feel. I knew the history behind Auschwitz and the facts and statistics, but actually picturing crowds of people being made to walk into the room, locked in and gassed to death, then taken into the next room, being stripped and cremated, was very difficult. One of the lessons from Auschwitz which we concentrated on while we were there was trying to see the victims as individuals and not just focus on the statistics. This is actually harder than it seems at first. It’s easy to imagine 20 or even 100 people, as these are numbers we can picture and relate to our life, but 6,000,000 people is more than most of us will ever have experienced, and trying to imagine that many different life stories, all totally unique, is intangible.

Finally, during our visit to Auschwitz One we saw the house of Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz. Höss was in charge of overseeing what happened in Auschwitz One, and lived with his family of four children in a house only yards away from the crematorium. This really showed me that the Nazis and people in charge of the running of the genocide honestly believed that they were doing the right thing, to the extent that Höss was able to bring up his children just next door to the site where innocent people were being murdered and abused every day. Höss was caught after the war and we saw the gallows, situated next to the gas chamber in the site of Auschwitz One, where he was hanged on the 16^th April 1947.

Gallows where Rudolf Höss was hanged 

-Sarah