Bearing witness

The Auschwitz museum aspect of the tour Auschwitz-Birkenau was intriguing for several reasons. The tour wound through several of the existing “barrack” structures that existed prior to WW2. There were photos of the prisoners at the beginning but as the volume of Jews increased they could not keep up with photos so they turned to tattooing the numbers and their names disappeared.

The museum exhibits were of items found when the camps were abandoned including drawings done by the Nazi’s such as the one above depicting a doctor injecting phenol into a man’s heart to kill him. There were also photos that the Nazi’s took of their own activities that a prisoner discovered hidden in a wall before they left. They took the photos with them and kept them for several years before turning them over to the museum. They wanted to make sure they did not get into the wrong hands and get destroyed.

The prisoners from Auschwitz were used to build Birkenbau including the gas chambers and crematoriums. Most of them were worked to death. There was a never ending supply of new prisoners to do the work. The amount of resources that it took for the Holocaust was immense – both in manpower and physical resources to create the camps to try to keep what he was doing hidden as much as possible. It makes you wonder what might have happened if Hitler would have slaughtered people in the open or been satisfied with land/ resource acquisition without trying to create the perfect Aryan race as well.

The steps on the stairs between the floors between the exhibits in the museum were so worn in places by shoes, it was almost necessary to use the rail. While these steps might be a couple of hundred years old, they felt like were a thousand years old. It didn’t seem like soldiers or prisoners could be responsible for this.

There were 24 people in our group with one guide and the tour groups were spaced about every 5 minutes apart. Do the steps represent the wear and tear of millions of people who have visited the museum over the past 75 plus years bearing witness to this horror story of history?