Columns

A place of exceptional horror

By BILL MAXWELL
Published December 17, 2006

"You are entering a place of exceptional horror and tragedy. Please show your respect for those who suffered and died here, behaving in a manner suitable to the dignity of their memory."

These words are on the first sign that greets visitors at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in Auschwitz, Poland. I visited the camps in September 2000, and I wrote about it then for the St. Petersburg Times.

Everything about that trip comes flooding back now because of the so-called Holocaust conference last week in Iran. Convened by Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and featuring our own David Duke, the Louisiana former Ku Klux Klan leader, the conference's intent was to prove that the Holocaust was, at worst, a complete hoax or, at best, a greatly exaggerated tale of mass murder to justify the creation of Israel.

If I could make a wish and have it come true, here is what it would be: I would force Ahmadinejad, Duke and all the other revisionists at the conference to come with me to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps to experience the full horror of these places.

Following are highlights of my visit of six years ago and facts from my research.

Above the main gate of Auschwitz, through which prisoners walked each day to and from 12-hour-a-day jobs, is the mocking inscription, "Arbeit macht frei." Translation: Work brings freedom. Everything about the camp mocks civilized life, the rusting barbed wire and abandoned railway symbolizing the Third Reich's folly.

Some clusters of the red-brick buildings (called blocks) at Auschwitz resemble neat college dormitories, belying the suffering that occurred inside. The camp was an abandoned Polish army base, and the Nazis turned the structures into death houses, torture chambers and labs where some of the world's most gruesome experiments on humans were conducted.

Most Jews and Gypsies deported to Auschwitz were killed in gas chambers as soon as they stepped off the train. In Block 4, Room 1, I saw the urn holding the ashes of many victims. I stood in rooms where women, thinking they were about to shower, undressed and waited for streams of water only to begin choking on Zyklon-B gas that SS men poured into the chamber from above. After the Nazis removed the women's earrings, gold tooth fillings, rings and hair, they took the bodies to incinerators. Or, if the incinerators overflowed with human flesh, the bodies were dumped onto crude funeral pyres.

Many prisoners died from hard work, starvation, malaria, filthy living quarters, extreme cold and disease spread by rats and insects. Most of the sick reporting to the camp hospital went untreated because of crowding. SS doctors decided who lived and died. The weak were immediately gassed or were given a shot of phenol in the heart. Those who could work were treated. Prisoners feared the hospital. They called it the "anteroom to the crematorium."

Blocks 10 and 11 were a prison within a prison. The courtyard between 10 and 11 is enclosed on two sides by a high wall called the "Wall of Death." Here is where the SS shot thousands of prisoners, mostly Poles. In front of Block 11, the SS flogged prisoners.

If Auschwitz was a place of evil, Birkenau - where the majority of the prisoners were killed and burned - was a site of ultimate evil and insanity. Less than a mile from Auschwitz, Birkenau had more than 300 wooden and brick buildings on 425 acres. Sixty-seven of the buildings remain. The Nazis destroyed the others as the Soviets approached.

Birkenau, housing as many as 100,000 prisoners by 1944, was divided into several camps. Inmates suffered and died from overwork, thirst, foul living conditions and epidemics spread by rats. While SS officers at Auschwitz regularly killed hundreds a day, the butchers at Birkenau often murdered and burned thousands. At Birkenau, I saw four crematoria with gas chambers, two makeshift gas chambers in renovated farmhouses and cremation pyres and pits.

Ghostly chimney flues stand like sentinels of evil against gray skies. They are all that remain of the wooden horse stables that became efficient human death chambers. In addition to removing the smoke of burned flesh from the units, the flues served another grim purpose: The burning bodies inside the chutes kept the buildings warm in the winter. Outside the buildings, open ash pits hold the remains of thousands of people.

Auschwitz-Birkenau alone operated for five years and was the major center of Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" - the elimination of European Jewry. Hitler managed to slaughter at least 1.5-million Jews and others here before the Soviets arrived.

The Holocaust is real. It is the worst instance of premeditated annihilation in the history of humankind. An ingathering of fools in Iran cannot erase this reality.

[Last modified December 16, 2006, 19:43:50]