It is a icy Monday April 2025. It doesn't rain, But the wind fiddles with thermal garments until it sneaks into an even more frozen heart. We are many who wait on the other side of the fence, But a voice is not heard higher than a whisper. Even adolescents await respectful. It is the price of being at the doors of Auschwitz, The dark room of Europe's conscience, The landfill of our principles, The epitome of Nazi barbarism.
Our guide is called Silvia. Black Boots, Eyebrows Ceja, Temperate voice. Not a single smile will sketch in the three hours that the horror tour lasts. There is no place here for irony.
Not a single smile will sketch in the three hours that the horror tour lasts. There is no place here for irony
The first impact, That poster in the frontispiece of the field that we have seen so many times in cinema and documentaries: “Work sets you free", Work will make you free. Thousands of Poles, Gypsies, Slavs and, especially, Jews, they housed hopeful when reading it. Maybe, They would surely think, They bring us here to work. No matter how hard the conditions are, We can survive.
Big mistake. Over five years, According to official estimates, They were deported to Auschwitz, from all places in Nazi Europe, 1,3 million people. The vast majority, 1,1 million, She was killed. Only one 15% of prisoners to survive.
Eighty years later, The heart is full of shame. Do we have the right to be here? Do we do well in walking through the facilities in which people whose only crime was born on the other side of delirium was exterminated without meaning?
In this time, Far from losing interest, Each year the influx of visitors to Auschwitz has increased. The record surpassed 2019, over 2,5 Millions of visitors. After the pandemic, The figures have shot again. And total, 25 Millions of people have looked at madness. Maybe it's the best vaccine. Maybe.
Do we do well in walking through the facilities in which people whose only crime was born on the other side of delirium was exterminated without meaning?
As to give encouragement to these reflections, In the first building where we go, A huge poster faces that maximum attributed to the American philosopher of Spanish origin, George Santayana: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it". Remember, as.
The following is frightening: wide stays in which material memories of prisoners are piled up in incredible amounts: suitcases with the names of owners who never had the opportunity to claim them, Mountains of shoes ajados forming a report and gray mass, prostheses of which physical disabled were stripped, Gas condemned barely getting out of the train ... glasses, dishes, bowls and even A room with two tons of woman's hair That the Nazis, After shaving them they used to create textiles and felt.
Then we are going through barracks. In one highlights an almost tolerable -looking room, With bed, closet and desk. It is the space for the "kapos", German prisoners pardoned by the SS only to put them at the head of each enclosure and that physically and mentally torture the Jews. Hard types, unscrupulous. The greater the torture, The Kapos were better treated. They knew it, and they gave themselves to the task conscientiously.
Another barracks presents a huge corridor full of prisoners' photos, Most of the Poles activists against the Nazis (No one bothered to photograph them, They were considered lower than animals). Their names are stuck in the mind with their horror looks ... Rozalia Banido, Barbara Smieszek, Josefa Wieczorek, Zdenka Hlavica, Antonie kozak… is a photo, Silvia explains, They were taken upon arrival to the field. That is why a certain healthy air can still be recognized on their faces. The following would be hunger. A hunger that is not possible to understand without having suffered.
This is the Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's statement, Auschwitz survivor, In his essential work "Man in search of meaning": “When the last layers of subcutaneous fat disappeared and we seemed skeletons disguised with skin and tatters, We could see that our bodies devoured themselves. The organism would digest their own proteins and the muscles disappeared; then, The body lost all resistance power. One after others, The members of our small barrack community were dying. We could calculate, With shocking precision, Who will be next, And even when the turn would come to us ".
When the last layers of subcutaneous fat disappeared and we seemed skeletons disguised with skin and tatters, We could see that our bodies devoured themselves
When hunger or despair caused a man to stop working on those inexhaustible days that began to 4:30, exposed to impossible temperatures, No decent footwear and with few rags to cover, Then it was eliminated. Jews only served to save labor; When they were no longer useful, They were exterminated.
The tourists of the 21st century carry boots, Thermal t -shirts and a feather coat, And we are unable to get hot. And it is April. And the sun shines. From our mind outside deprivations it is not possible to conceive that cold. Another passage of Dr. Frankl is appropriate: “One morning I saw a partner - a brave and worthy man- cry disconsolate like a child because, Having shrunk his shoes by moisture, His feet did not enter and he would have to walk barefoot through the snow ”.
Silvia makes us now lead to the courtyard of Block 11, where, years after, A wall was erected on which fresh flowers are always maintained in memory of the thousands of people shot against that wall, called without euphemisms "THE WALL OF DEATH”. It had to be rebuilt because the Germans had dismantled her, In a miserable attempt to erase the traces of atrocity, When at the end of 1944 They saw the lost war.
More 5.000 prisoners were shot without contemplation before experiments with Ziklon B gas, an insecticide used originally to disinfect clothes and eliminate lice containing cyanhydric acid, It will show, from 1942, as a much more useful systematic method of extermination.
Before leaving the Auschtwitz I field and going to its extension to three kilometers, In the town of Birkenau, We still pass through a place where a gallows were built that, According to Silvia, It was used to terrorize prisoners during listing -that could last hours- or to hang those who tried to escape. To dissuade them from their plans, also, If they were captured they were condemned to see how ten people from their barracks were hanged for each of those who had tried to flee.
Our guide reminds us that, in that same gallows, that remains untouched over time, It was executed, in 1947, The Rudolh Höss field commander, head of the "effectiveness" with which Auschwitz worked, Supervisor and builder of gas chambers and the mechanization of mass murder. What effective can be for the desire for revenge for an eye ...
It was executed, in 1947, The Rudolh Höss field commander, head of the "effectiveness" with which Auschwitz worked
Captured in 1946 For the British, Höss confessed with coldness their crimes, that he did not consider as such. Never, until his death, expressed the slightest sign of regret. Essential, certainly, The tape "The Zone of Interest", Oscar for the best foreign film in 2023, that he reviews the life of Höss and the banalization that he and his family make of the holocaust.
Birkenau and "the final solution"
In his colossal work “Auschwitz, The final solution ", Lauren Rees, who directed a series of documentaries on this issue for BBC, Explain how Hitler and his main commanders come to the conclusion, In full war, When Germany still thought I could conquer England and Russia, that it is necessary to find a final solution to "the Jewish issue". In other words, orders to exterminate 11 Millions of Hebrews who lived in the different countries of the Europe submitted.
To do, A quick and sufficiently discreet enough system was necessary that prevented them. They found him, as stated, In gas chambers. For that purpose, Auschwitz's expansion was conceived in the small town of Birkenau, located to some 3 kilometers of the original facilities.
Just walking through its huge avenues designed for the arrival and eviction of huge trains of prisoners, and approaching their barracks in which more than 900 prisoners in spaces destined in principle more than 100, The magnitude of the Nazi purpose can be understood.
We listen, Beyond the dismay, How Silvia explains that in 1943 and 1944 It was constant arrival of trains loaded with Jews from France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Holland, Greece…
After opening the doors of transport, men, women, Elders and Hungry Children, dirty and terrified were forced to evict well -. Then they were confiscated all their belongings and, last, They were separated according to an atrocious principle: aside, Those who could work; other, The too weak and, therefore, unusable. These, approximately the 80% of the total, They were driven that same day to gas cameras.
The Jews selected to clean the latrines were considered lucky because they could put their hands in the stool and thus heat them for a while and, perhaps, Avoid losing fingers due to freezing
The workers -it would be necessary to say slaves- They were subjected to even more inhuman treatment, If that is possible, that above the above. They slept in meager cement literas, crowded in groups of nine, With the only relief of two roubed blankets. They had exactly 1 minute to make your needs in holes exposed to everyone's view. The one who did not get evacuated had lost the chance for the whole day. Perhaps the one that follows is the anecdote that best defines the situation of the prisoners. Overwhelming listen to it in the mouth of our guide: The Jews selected to clean the latrines were considered lucky because they could put their hands in the stool and thus heat them for a while and, perhaps, evitar perder dedos por congelación.
For the extermination to work methodically to your liking, The Nazis discovered that it was essential to avoid panic. So the convicted, new arrivals of long trips, disoriented and familic, They were driven, almost always at night, Towards his irremisible death, Under a lie: You had to shower them to, the next day, send them to the workfield that corresponded to them.
The prisoners were over to undress and leave their clothes in a place that they later recognized to dress again -so they saved having to undress them before incineration -, and they were introduced into a camera in which, In moments of maximum capacity, They came to die of a thousand in a thousand. When they discovered that there was no shower there and they realized what awaited them, They shouted, aullaban, They kicked and tried to reach the windows while the gas was causing them a horrible death by suffocation. Twenty minutes later -twenty minutes of unbearable agony -, Everything had ended and other Jewish prisoners were forced to transport their bodies to the crematorium.
Birkenau, with 190 hectares -four times the size of the city of the Vatican- It never became completely built, But he witnessed the greatest amount of executions of the entire Auschwitz environment. The Nazis, Because of its size, They could never demolish it. Only the gas cameras fly. Those remains, as they were, They are still preserved as another symbol of horror.
So far the visit. So far this account of indecency. Like any reader knows, Ríos de Tinta have been written about Auschwitz and Holocaust. And not for nothing. Man, By nature, seeks to understand. And although in this sinister passage in history there is not much space for reason, muchos han dedicado sus vidas a intentar aplicarla. Above all, supervivientes de los campos como el citado Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel o Ana Frank, quien no consiguió sobrevivir, pero cuyo diario es uno de los libros más leídos del holocausto-. También han escrito periodistas, filósofos, political, psicólogos…
La propaganda tuvo tal influencia en nosotros que dimos por hecho que la exterminación de los judíos era algo natural en un contexto bélico
No podría el arriba firmante aportar nada de mayor interés, al margen de la convicción de que sí, de que conviene llevar a nuestros jóvenes -vimos muchos durante la mañana- to visit Auschwitz and make them understand not the large numbers behind the Holocaust, but, Maybe more important, Individual stories, full of greatness and miseries, admirable or simple, that stopped being written by pure arbitration.
Much has been written about the possible reasons that led the German people to turn to the delusions of a madman. Definitely, Laurence Rees's work mentioned above dives in this reality as few. It includes the last testimony of this report, that of an old SS soldier, Oskar Groening, destined for Auschwitz with only 22 years: “Propaganda had such an influence on us that we assumed that the extermination of the Jews was something natural in a war context. And this is why we do not experience any feeling of compassion or empathy when we sent them to the gas chamber ”. And the children? "The children were not, for the time being, enemies: The enemy was the blood that ran through his veins; The enemy was the fact that they grew to become dangerous Jews. That is why they also received the same treatment ".
