AUSCHWITZ

I start this section of my website by talking about Auschwitz, and my journey there in August 2003, with a mate of mine.  This is the first part of my discussion of my travels because, of all the things I saw in Europe and Korea, the horrors of Auschwitz in Poland, and Sorokdo in Korea will live the longest.  Sorokdo was a leper colony, where 600,000 people died between 1957 and 1967, building a garden for the benefit of the Korean people.  When the lepers rose up, demanding basic human rights, they were slaughtered by the Government.  The resulting conflict engulfed Korea, and brought down the Government in 1972.  Auschwitz, of course, was a Nazi death camp.

Sorokdo means 'small deer island', a name that is at hideous odds with the mortuary chamber and the cells used to torture people on this island.  Auschwitz-Oswecim was a mental asylum dedicated to correcting mental problems.  This is also at hideous odds with the gas chambers and the rest of this place. 

I start this section of my site by describing the photo I have included at the top of this page.  Taken in August 2003 it shows the Berkinau Gate at Auschwitz.  Auschwitz consisted of eight death camps, and 32 labour camps, covering 400,000 acres.  The most famous of these camps is Auschwitz-Oswecim, but it was here, at Berkinau, that most of the deaths occurred.  Oswecim was a mental asylum; Berkinau was a death camp.  The survivors of Auschwitz labelled this picture the 'death gate' due to the number of people who entered it, and never left this site.

Myself and a mate walked the train tracks leading to Berkinau, seeing it draw nearer, seeing the towers, the gun emplacements, the wire fences, the buildings, and, above all, seeing the gate which leads into Auschwitz.  Putting my hands on the death gate itself, leading into this most bloody of the Auschwitz sites, is something I will never forget.  Beside the death gate is a black marble sign reading 'Welcome to Auschwitz-Berkinau.  Show respect to those who died within these walls'.  This sort of brings people down to Earth.  One does not walk through the gate the Jews used.  As an act of kindness, this gate has been closed.  I for one could not walk through it, especially after seeing the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Oswecim. 

Before I continue any further, let me say that I made a journal of my trip through Europe.  This is shown to most people who visit our home, yet the majority of these get to the section on Auschwitz, and ask 'when does that section stop?".  I intend to make people sick.  I want to disturb people.  I want to show the utter horror and rage I felt at Auschwitz.  I want to show what it felt like to stand at the execution wall, and to put my hands on the trays used to hold the bodies as they entered the crematoria (usually called furnaces).  I want to make people sick.  I want to portray the horror that grips people within this place, the grimmest of all the locations I have ever visited.  Be warned, if you read on.  To put it in perspective, at the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Oswecim, there is a sign reading 'show respect to those who suffered and died within these walls'.  Every person, regardless of culture or religion, takes off his or her hat at this stage, except for Jews of course, who must wear headgear within the walls of Auschwitz.

 I think this is the most desolate, and horrifying, of all the pictures I have ever taken.  When taking it, I was standing at the site of the unloading ramps, where the prisoners left the trains, facing towards the watch tower that sits over the Berkinau Gate, which leads into Auschwitz.  To walk this distance took at least 15 minutes, giving an idea of the size of Auschwitz.  The buildings on the right housed the inmates of Auschwitz; to the left was the road leading to the gas chambers.  The wooden stands at each side are guard towers.

The difference between left and right was recorded in a ledger called, appropriately enough, the 'book of the dead'.  I've held part of that ledger, with 80,000 names from three days' work at Auschwitz.  Over 300 such ledgers were found at Auschwitz.  You go figure.

Auschwitz is grim.  I walked the tracks leading from the Berkinau Gate to the unloading ramps, and it was the longest 15 or 20 minutes of my lift.  Inside the Berkinau Gate, the entrance to Auschwitz-Berkinau, there are posters for sale.  One of these struck me.  It shows the scene to the left of my last photo (above) where a trench is filled with naked bodies.  Nazi troops and guards are standing around, but the top of the picture has been changed to show a flame.  The effect, in total, is of a candle made from bodies, burning with a single flame inside the whole of Auschwitz.  Most people write the words 'Never again' over this image. 

To fully appreciate Auschwitz-Berkinau-Oswecim, one should go to the Holocaust Exhibition in London.  Nowadays Auschwitz is called the State Museum at Oswecim.  In the 1940s it was known as the Corrective Facility for Mentally Insane Children at Auschwitz.  The names of over 250,000 children were recorded in the ledgers of Auschwitz.  Make of that what you will.  The Holocaust Exhibition in London puts this in perspective, by showing models of Auschwitz, and records of interviews with Nazi guards.  The most famous of these is the great debate over whether to use two or three bullets to execute a Jew.  Every person who was employed at Auschwitz had to be certified as psychologically insane.  Every potential employee was shown the death camps, and then handed a gun.  If they wanted to be employed, every applicant to Auschwitz had to walk up to the nearest person and shoot him or her at least twice in the head.  No other method would get you a job at Auschwitz.  The debate was over whether the Jew, or whoever, should be shot twice or three times.

The resolution was simple, to the Nazis.  Three shots were fatal; two good shots left the prisoner alive for about 30 minutes.  This was the only time the guards were allowed to masturbate.  In other circumstances, the penalty was death.  The words to this interview are on display at the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London.  I think it is important to display these words, even though they made me sick- which is what they are obviously supposed to do.

The picture on the right shows the camp buildings at Auschwitz-Berkinau, the main death camp at Auschwitz.  I stepped inside these buildings, and saw the central trench which was a communal toilet, and the open spaces for people to lie on, and could not take any more pictures.   About 100 yards long, these buildings held 1,000 people, with one chimney to provide heat.  In the fighting that saw the fall of Auschwitz, 360,000 acres of the camps were destroyed by fire, leaving stone foundations and chimneys sitting in neat rows, in the middle of the devastation around them.

Of over 2,000 buildings, only 16 are like they were when Auschwitz fell to the Soviets in January, 1945.  Most of these have required major restoration work.  As for the rest, that image of row upon row of chimneys, sitting in the dust of Auschwitz, will take a long time for me to forget.

I'm being very good to you all by giving you a picture right after that other picture.  Most articles would make you wait.  Sadly, for you, it's one of the most gruesome of all the pictures of Auschwitz.  The site was originally the office of the First Commandant of the Mental Asylum at Auschwitz-Berkinau-Oswecim, Rudolph Hoess.  He was captured when the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, and his office was demolished.  In its place, this gallows, used to execute tens of thousands of people at Auschwitz, was used to execute Rudolph Hoess in April 1947.  The building in the background was one of the seven gas chambers, and accounted for hundreds of thousands of lives.

By the way, Hoess was the last person executed at any of the camps at Auschwitz; the myth that Hitler was hanged at this gallows is just that: a myth.  Hitler was killed on the 30 April 1945, during the Soviet attacks on Berlin.  While his body was buried in Poland, the burial did not take place at Auschwitz.  In 1972, when Neo-Nazis erected a shrine over Hitler's burial site, his body was taken to Moscow, beheaded, and burned in a copy of the Auschwitz crematoria.  His skull is on display in Moscow- sort of disproving most of the myths surrounding his supposed escape to South America.  The Nazis had samples of Hitler's DNA, which were used to prove the identity of the skull in Moscow.  This odd story is yet another good thing to have resulted from the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 (apart from the obvious benefits of getting rid of those communist SOBs).

The first thing to strike me about the route to the gas chambers was that it is rather sudden.  Here I was, in a place with lots of trees, on a street, and next, I was standing facing this black marble sign telling me that I was about to enter the one fully intact gas chamber of Auschwitz.  Silence is demanded, by law.  Any of the Nazi slogans, if said out loud, can be punished by imprisonment.  No head gear, such as hats or caps, can be worn within the gas chambers of Auschwitz.  Lastly, while cameras are not banned, I doubt that people think of them. 

I saw the stone walls of this room, and almost missed the fact of where I was.  It's more or less a plain stone room.  Then I saw the marks on the ground, where people had gouged their way through concrete while dying from the gas that filled this room.  Then I saw the people, obviously Jewish, with their traditional caps, holding black-and-white pictures of their parents, or grandparents or whatever.  I've seen the tables used to dissect the bodies at Sorokdo, once described as Korea's shame, where 600,000 people died between 1957 and 1967, but I have never seen anything to equal the horror of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Oswecim.

From the gas chambers one walks to the crematoria, and to put those in perspective, there was this American-looking tourist with a camcorder, recording all he saw.  I walked into the crematoria, and saw the trays, the furnaces, the tracks, the ashes blasted onto everything in the room, and heard this guy, behind me, say 'Oh Christ', as he put his camcorder away in his bag.  I think that sums it all up. 

The most famous picture of all from Auschwitz is of the crematorium I tam talking about.  A cart is being pushed towards the crematorium, loaded with bodies taken from the gas chambers, and pushed by prisoners.  Standing around are guards, with guns, laughing as smoke pours from the chimney in the background.  I've stood in that gas chamber, and, I am glad to say, I was unable to put my hands on the trays those bodies were bound for.  In each new location I see, I place one, or both, hands on the floor.  This tradition started in Rome, but at Auschwitz I saw the ashes ground into the metal of the retorts (trays for the bodies) and saw the indescribable blackness in that maw-like tunnel leading into the crematoria, usually called furnaces, and could not complete my ritual of putting one hand on the centre piece of everything I see.

Never in my life have I been so overwhelmed by the raw emotion of a place.  Auschwitz screams anger, hate, rage, despair, and hopelessness.  I stood there, looking at that black gulf yawning in front of me, leading into what are usually called the furnaces, and I could not drop my hands the last few inches into the ashes on those retorts.  I pictured people led into this place in their tens of thousands, burned within this room I was standing in, and I was unable to place so much as a finger in the inches-deep black layer that coats the retorts.  With hindsight, I think I would have had to have some psychological problem to actually put my hands in the ashes blasted onto the retorts, less than four feet from the crematoria of Auschwitz.

If you haven't realised it by now, the picture on the left shows the crematoria, usually called furnaces, of Auschwitz-Oswecim, where tens of thousands of people died from 1940-1945.  There is a compulsion to this place.  The evil perpetrated within these walls is like a magnet, and draws people to it.  These include the Jews walking through Auschwitz waving flags, and people like me, who wondered if it would be alright to remember the dead within this place.  Read Frank McCourt's Tis to read a better description of the crematoria of Dachau, and the horrible pull these places exert on people near to them.

From a clinical point of view, the reason the walls in the last picture are black is simple: as the retorts were pulled back to fit in more bodies, the ashes from the previous bodies belched from the crematorium, and poured into this room. 

The picture on the right shows the so-called 'death road' at Auschwitz-Berkinau.  This was the road that led from the train tracks to the gas chambers.  Unlike the rest of Auschwitz, it has been left in its original condition, with only a layer of dirt over the ashes that made the original road.  The end of this road is sealed off, but it can be rejoined later, at a pond-  a rather disturbing pond.  Beside this pond are four black marble pillars (common around Auschwitz), which inform the visitor that the ponds in front of you were originally trenches, filled in in January 1945, in the days before the liberation of Auschwitz.  Before that time, they held- and still hold- the ashes of at least 250,000 people.  The road in this picture was made with the ashes of about 500,000 people. 

One point is worth repeating at this juncture: although this road was made from human ashes, as were all the roads within the 40 camps at Auschwitz, the original surface has been coated with dirt, so there is no fear of anyone walking in ashes taken from the crematoria.  No sane person would have allowed tourists to walk on such a site if it was made from the ashes of the dead.

Next, finally, we came to the crematoria of Auschwitz-Berkinau.  Considering the number of people who died there, they are not that disturbing- in as much as I was affected to a greater extent by the execution wall than by these chambers.  The gas chambers at Auschwitz-Berkinau were a later version of the chambers at Oswecim.  They 'improved' the kill number from 350 people a day to about 2,000 an hour.  Rudolph Hoess, the guy in charge, described them as the final proof that Auschwitz was a death camp.  He banned records of the people who died there, as such records could not be defended without admitting that Auschwitz was a death camp.  When asked, at the Nurmberg trials, how many people had died at Auschwitz, Hoess gave a famous answer, to the effect of: 'There were at least two gas chambers, for five years, and they could kill at least 350 people a day, each, or about 5,000 a week.  At its peak, Auschwitz had five main gas chambers, working day and night for three months, killing 2,000 people every hour each, or 10,000 people an hour, or 240,000 people a day.  How many died?  At least ten million. that I know of, but I wasn't there very often'.  Hoess was hanged at Auschwitz in 1947, but those figures still slammed through my mind as I walked towards the place where the deaths occurred.  Hoess was executed on 10,000 counts of murder, personally committed by him, and 250,000 counts of being an accomplice to murder.  Between one and ten million people died at Auschwitz.

Bad numbers to be thinking of as you walk towards the ramps leading into the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Berkinau.

Of course, one can't walk into the gas chambers at Berkinau, as they were blown up by the Nazis on the 5 January 1945.  The wreckage is there for all to see, with warning signs all over the place.  The ramps are visible, leading down into the gas chambers.  The roof, pictured left, fell in on the gas chambers and the crematoria, preserving them to some degree.   At Auschwitz-Oswecim, a photo is on display, taken by a Soviet photographer on the 6 January 1945, when this place was still coated with ashes.  To take that photo, the photographer had to climb onto the site of the crematorium, used to burn the bodies.  Madly, that picture, taken from inside the gas chambers of Auschwitz, shows green grass and trees a few hundred yards away, signalling freedom for those within the camps.  I find that disturbing.  Green grass here, death for thousands there.

I will never forget this site.  As a mate of mine, who traveled around Europe with me, said: Auschwitz  was probably the highlight of the trip.  A grim highlight, through, but no tourist trap can compare to a place like this.  Whether it affects you as it did me, or whether you just see the train tracks, the trenches, the ponds filled with ashes, the photos of towers of fire blazing within the camps, or the piles of bodies at the execution wall, Auschwitz is memorable.  Before showing my last photos from the camps, I'll quote Sven Goran Eriksson, the head coach of the English national football team, after his team visited Auschwitz the day before a match with Poland: 'What did I think of Auschwitz?  It was an experience.  I don't know whether it was a good or bad experience, but it was one I will never forget'. 

For me, it was a bad experience in the sense of seeing the racks used to break prisoners' backs, and the infamous Room 27, in Cell Block 11, at Auschwitz-Oswecim, where the final solution began with the gassing of over 600 people in 1942.  The picture on the right shows the gates that the Nazis closed to keep the (mostly Jewish) prisoners in the corridor leading to room 27.  The black sign on the left-hand wall confirms that it was against this gate that those people died, to mark the start of the final solution, and the march to genocide that followed it.  Room 27 is at the end of this corridor, on the right; the suffocation chambers are at the very end of this tunnel.  Most of those who died at Auschwitz died underground, in tunnels and corridors like this, or in the gas chambers; those who died in the suffocation chambers did so on their knees, with their heads forced down to the ground- sentenced for the crime of talking, which was banned by Nazi laws at Auschwitz.  Room 26, at the left-hand side of this corridor, is a shrine to a Rabbi who took the blame for the crime of talking, so that Allied spies could be given the first film made within Auschwitz, which showed tens of thousands of people being led into the gas chambers. 

America, being America, responded by bombing the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin.   Over 50,000 bombing runs were made in 72 hours, all aimed at this one target.  The bombing was so intense that it destroyed the Berlin subway, sewage, electricity and gas systems within a mile of the Gestapo building.  Over 150,000 people were killed in that series of bombing runs, yet the only damage done to the Gestapo HQ occurred when the air pressure outside blew the front door off its hinges.  Not one bomb hit that building, yet well over 100,000 people were killed, in an effort to stop the killing at Auschwitz.  Eventually, the prisoners, who had asked for Auschwitz to be bombed by the Americans, rose up in revolt in late 1944.  Four of the seven gas chambers were either destroyed or damaged to the point of being unusable; the rest were used to execute the prisoners who had revolted. 

The Gestapo building is now the centre piece for the Topography of Terror, which will eventually become the largest museum ever built.  By 2006 or 2007, it will include the German memorial to the victims of the final solution, which will be unveiled at the same time Germany formally accepts responsibility for WW2.  That memorial, consisting of 50,000 pillars of stone (one for every 1,000 people killed in the war with Germany) is being built on the site of the Gestapo bunker.  Thus, the memorial to the victims of Auschwitz will be built on the bunker used to protect the people responsible for Auschwitz.  I find that very ironic.

The picture on the left shows the execution wall at Auschwitz-Oswecim, usually the first camp people visit.  It is situated right next door to block 11, where the final solution began, and unlike all other parts of Auschwitz, there are no windows in the walls facing towards this spot.  The Nazis intended to keep this location very secret, although it was well known among the camp inmates.  There are two ways to arrive at this spot.  Firstly, by walking through the main gate (behind me as I took this photo), or secondly, by following the route taken by the prisoners, as they showered and walked, naked, into this courtyard.  Prisoners were given two choices when they saw this wall: step forwards and die by firing squad, or go back into the room behind them.  Those who refused to die by firing squad were strapped to a rack and, once their backs were broken, strapped to this wall and shot anyway.  The Nazis admitted to being rather unsure as to how many people died here, but they did say that it was at least 10,000, and probably not above 100,000.

This part of Auschwitz is very much an alcove, with no large signs, no beaten path to it, and nothing to show what happened here.  It is a dusty, empty, rectangle of land between two buildings, with this wall at one end.  That said, as I walked into this area, there were people showing their children this wall.  Everyone speaks in whispers before what is, for me, by far the worst location in the whole of Auschwitz.  I don't mean to editoralise, but as I walked across the courtyard, seeing this wall draw nearer, I was aware of so many minor details, such as the dust puffing up around my feet, the two, utterly blank, walls rising over this place, the photos of piles of naked bodies heaped around this wall, with queues of people waiting for their turn, under the watchful gaze of many guards, and one photo in particular, showing a man being dragged towards the execution wall by two guards, after his back had been broken on the rack that is displayed beside the door leading into this place.

Now, the people who run Auschwitz, as a museum, obviously want people to have the sort of reaction I had.  I think this is appropriate.  Places like Auschwitz will be interpreted differently by many people.  All the organisers can do is show the reality, as well as they can; the interpretation is up to the visitor.  This is true of one place I connect to Auschwitz: Sorokdo in South Korea (of which I speak at the start of this page).

The director of the school I work at phoned me one Friday night, and asked me if I had anything planned for that Saturday.  I said no, so she asked me if I would like to go to Sorokdo, as she was showing her children this island, and assumed I would be interested.  One of the centre pieces of Sorokdo is the mortuary table used to dissect the bodies of the people who died there, and also to sterilize women who were infected with leprosy.  Over 600,000 people died at Sorokdo before the Korean government declared that the survivors of that bloody time should be left to live out their lives in peace.  There are many monuments at Sorokdo, with one standing on the spot where Korean soldiers started executing the lepers, and another standing in the centre of the park built by those lepers.  There are no signs, no additions; the rooms used to torture the lepers have minute cards with things like 'lepers were tortured here' written on them.  Only above the table used to dissect the bodies do the organisers add anything, which is a poem called 'hopelessness', or the 'end of hope', written by a 25-year-old man who had survived the executions carried out by the government, but knew that he was going to die anyway- and fairly horribly.

People say that, when I describe things like Auschwitz and Sorokdo, I paint a graphic picture of the horrors contained within these places.  Some people have gone so far as to say I should be a journalist, because I can paint a horrific picture with a few sentences.  I disagree.  It takes no skill to describe how my stomach rolled when I saw the shirts worn by leprosy victims who died at Sorokdo.  They are stained with blood, and have no buttons, as the average leper had no fingers with which to close the buttons on his or hr shirt.  Each button was replaced with a five, or six, inch-long metal pin, put in place by using one's mouth, or the stumps left after one's fingers fell off.  I don't need any skill to paint this picture; it paints itself. 

I mean, it does not take much skill to portray the sadness I felt when I turned away from the statue of the Archangel Gabriel, dedicated to the people who died at Sorokdo, to see a leprosy victim playing chess with some friends.  He had no nose, no fingers, was mostly blind, or so it seemed, and was in a wheelchair.  Yet he still took the time to greet me as the first foreigner he had seen go to the bother of seeing the lepers at Sorokdo as people.  This reminded me of Na'gan, a walled city where old customs are still maintained.  One of the grandmasters of that city allowed me to see his creations- including three foot tall cows made from hay, as I was a foreigner.  I was a bit cynical, until I realised that none of the Korean people with me were following me, as I was, literally, the only person allowed inside this room. (I was told later, by my director, that she had never heard of any person ever being allowed to enter that room, as Na'gan is famous for its cult-like defense of its heritage)  Koreans love foreigners, but then again, Koreans are great people.  Well, except for the period 1957-1967, when they butchered 600,000 lepers at Sorokdo. 

This is my final point about Auschwitz: I have not changed the facts here.  They speak for themselves, and anyone who listens to them will respond.  The response will be different, but there will be a response.  As with my description of Sorokdo, I am presenting facts, and nothing more.  The best thing I can say about Auschwitz is that, when a British politician says Germany should never be allowed to forget its sins, I say that the world should never forget Auschwitz.  Fuck punishing Germany.  Lets remember what happened, and make sure it never happens again.   By the way, my last pictures are of the memorial at Auschwitz.  Read it, think about what it says, and if you are ever in that part of Europe, make the trip to Auschwitz.  As one of the English translations of Mein Kampf puts it: this is an evil book.  Those who seek to safeguard democracy will study it, so as to protect the world from the evil contained within.  Auschwitz is an evil place, yet we must be aware of it, so as to be sure that, 500 years from now, there are no people remembering another version of Auschwitz.

AUSCHWITZ 1940-1945