Auschwitz

Additional information added in January 2014:

This is the post that gets the most clicks on my site. Finally one of the photos from this post is used as a book cover. Please click here to check it out :)

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I was in Poland in December 2011 to visit my cousin who was doing Erasmus in Lodz. I also had a chance to visit the capital Warsaw  and another famous city Krakow . Since I was in Krakow, I visited the Auschwitz ( Oświęcim in Polish) as well.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau

Auschwitz was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II.

Auschwitz II–Birkenau was designated by the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Germany’s Minister of the Interior, as the place of the “final solution of the Jewish question in Europe”. From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp’s gas chambers from all over Nazi-occupied Europe.

Not only Jews but Gypsies, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners from other ethnic groups are deported by Nazis.

At the entrance of the camp, that famous slogan of Nazis for the concentration camps ” Arbeit macht frei”  (Work sets you free) was placed.

After their arrival they were put in barracks which were in awful condition.

Beds were arranged with some slope to put more people on it ( around 6-7 people in one row) and they were not strong enough to carry that amount of people. Because of this beds often collapsed and a lot of people at the bottom row died. They were usually the old people who could not fight with youngers to get place on the top of the beds.

Toilets:

The camp’s first commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified after the war at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three million people had died there (2.5 million gassed, and 500,000 from disease and starvation), a figure since revised to 1.3 million, around 90 percent of them Jews.

Model of Gas Chambers

Gas Chamber

Crematorium

Most of the gas chambers were destroyed by Nazis before they lost the war and the survivors from concentraion camps didn’t want them to be rebuilded.

In the museum, the personal stuff of the people are also shown:

I read about Auschwitz before I went there and watched quite a lot of films. However, none of them are enough to understand what it really was.  Humanity should not be faced with something like this ever again.

The Auschwitz Death Wall

I made a video with these photos by adding “Prelude in E-Minor (op.28 no. 4)” from Chopin. You can have a look here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twpdXu2dBF4

For more information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp

http://en.auschwitz.org/m/

List of films about Auschwitz and Holocaust:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_films