Auschwitz One

After the graveyard, we were taken to Auschwitz One. This is the work camp, with the famous sign ‘Arbeit Mach Frei’- ‘Work means Freedom’ in German- at the gate. Something that I found surprising about this site was that it was in the middle of a village, surrounded by houses, shops and people carrying out their everyday life. I’m not sure why, but I’d pictured the camp as being out in the middle of nowhere, perhaps because I couldn’t imagine people allowing the atrocity to happen somewhere where they couldn’t deny it’s existence.

 

Auschwitz one was surrounded by a double layer of very high barbed wire fencing and with intermittent signs with a skull and cross bones and the words ‘Halt!’ and ‘Stoj!’  written on them. This really gave the camp a hostile, threatening feel. Auschwitz one was originally set up as a work camp, but the conditions the prisoners were kept in were so horrendous that most were killed by the work. They were starved, only given a thin pair of clothes to wear- even in the thick snow in winter, and over exerted. The layout of the camp was tall red brick buildings in rows, and we went inside a few of them.

 

The first building we went in contained possessions and photographs of the prisoners. I found this particularly difficult and emotional, as it really personified the victims and also brought the scale of the genocide into something more tangible. There was a whole room full of suitcases, all of which had people’s names and addresses on them. This was poignant as it reminded us that, on entering the camp, people had with them any possessions that they thought they’d need to be relocated and the names allowed us to imagine the individuals, all of whom had different hopes, dreams and expectations of what would happen to them. They had these possessions taken from them on arrival.

 

Another room was full of shoes, some of which were very tiny and belonged to children, and there was a cabinet displaying items which belonged to babies. But the section which most affected me was the room full of hair.

 

The room contained 7 tonnes of human hair, which had been shaved from the heads of victims. It was normally exported and used for stuffing pillows and duvets, so the hair in the room was only a small sample of the total amount, as it was only that which was found there at the time of the liberation. Some of the hair was still styled into plaits or contained bobbles or grips, and seeing the sheer amount that was there was horrible because it really put into context the enormous number of people who were at the camp, and the reminder of the fact that the prisoners had their heads shaved showed the dehumanisation they went through on entry to the camp.

-Sarah