We visited Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria several years ago. It was a sobering experience which we believe is necessary in educating ourselves about the world’s history. It scares us how we see parallels to the world today. As we planned our trip to Northern Europe, we made sure to include a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenhau.

This former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp is where over 1.1 million people lost their lives. Even though I studied the Holocaust in school, it did not cover all that I learned during our day trip here. We also visited Oskar Schindler’s Factory and the Galicia Jewish Museum. Here is some of what we learned:

Arbeit macht frei

All people pass through the front gate where there is a sign in German, “Arbeit Macht Frei”, which means, “work sets you free”.

Prisoners are made to believe that they have come to these camps to work hard and rehabilitate themselves. The reality is that ~1.3 million people were sent here and at least 1.1 million died. This was an “extermination” camp, not a rehabilitation camp.

Lies of Relocation

The people sent to concentration camps were never told these were “concentration camps”. They were told they were being relocated, to pack at most only one bag of luggage as there would be things for them when they get to their new home. Some of the exhibits showed the luggage they carried and the items they had inside, including Nivea Creme. If you thought you would end up at a concentration camp, would you have packed body lotion? People were told to label their luggages with their name and details - this was how the Nazis tracked who they had brought in.

Who Are The Prisoners

90% of the prisoners were Jewish and ~1 of 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust died at this camp. The other 10% included Poles, Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah's Witnesses, Homosexuals, and other ethnic groups (still collecting data). One of the rooms we visited showed some of the prisoner cards they have. One struck me as it reads: “prisoner sent to camp for listening to foreign broadcast”. When we were in Malmö (Sweden), we were at the castle which played a rescue role during 1945 via “White Buses” rescuing concentration camp inmates. One such survivor was an American teenager who was traveling in Italy with her father to visit grandparents. The Nazis thought they might be spies and arrested them. Her father was killed at the camp.

Selection to the Gas Chambers

When Jews arrived at Birkenau, they were separated into two lines. Men and those over the age of 14 who were deemed ‘fit for work’ went to one side. The elderly, women, and other children were sent to the other side.

One story shared with us involved a mother with two sons. One of her sons was told to get in the line with the men. The woman was told that she and her younger son would be getting a “shower” to get clean, then reunited with the older son. Being a good mother wanting the best for her son, she begged the guard to let her older son come with them. It would be only a few hours later, when she and her two sons got naked to go into the shower room, that they would realize the mistake, the shower rooms were actually gas chambers. Poison came out from up top where the water should come from.

Human Experiments at Birkenhau

I didn’t mention this in the selection of gas chambers, but there were also those selected for human experimentation. The Third Reich leadership was very interested in sterilization and in fact, an estimated 300,000-400,000 people were subjected to forced sterilization under Hitler’s Germany. One infamous doctor (Carl Clauberg) experimented on women to develop a method of non-surgical mass sterilization. Horst Schumann experimented with x-ray sterilization on women’s ovaries and men’s testicles leaving them with radiation burns. All of these procedures were brutal and many died due to complications or killed so autopsies could be conducted.

When we visited, I learned of a woman named Eva Kor who had just passed away two weeks prior. She was in Kraków for her annual summer trip to guide people through the camp. She and her sister were part of the twins experiments conducted by Josef Mengele. Approximately three thousand twins passed through Auschwitz during WWII until its liberation at the end of the war. Eva dedicated her life to finding other twin survivors, share memories, and heal together. In 1993, she contacted Hans Münch, who was the only person acquitted of war crimes at the 1947 Auschwitz trials in Kraków. Together, they visited Auschwitz and Münch signed a document acknowledging the atrocities which happened there. She wanted to provide a meaningful ‘thank you’ gift and ended up giving him a forgiveness letter. You can learn more of her story here.

The Jewish People

At least 1 million Jews were deported to Auschwitz from all over the world. At the Galicia Jewish Museum, we learned of how the Holocaust continued to impact Jews for decades. A photography exhibit by Chuck Fishman depicts the lives of the remaining Jewish survivors and their descendants. Many people hid being Jewish from the public until 1989 when communism fell and Poland was independent. We saw a photograph of a man who received a gold chain and star of David on his 18th birthday. His grandmother had saved it for that date. Neither him nor his mother had known this “family secret” that they were Jewish until this moment. Poland once had over 3 million Jews and now it is closer to 10,000.

There is so much more that I haven’t shared here as the stories are endless. I encourage you to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau yourself. It is an incredibly busy place and you cannot just show up. Book your visit directly on the website (at least 3 months in advance) or you will need to pay quite astronomical fees to tour companies who only drive you there. All tours are conducted by certified guides from the memorial. Better yet, arrive early and tour the place yourself. The guides give you a short 90 minute tour and they skip over some of the exhibits. I saw some related to France, the Gypsies, and others that we just didn’t get to see because of the guided tour. Here are some more photos that we took: