When it had been confirmed that DarÓma, Michael and I would be going to Poland on Erasmus I knew it would be important to visit Auschwitz during the four months we would be living there. In the past I have visited a concentration camp in Berlin – Sachsenhausen - but was told this was nothing in comparison to what I would experience in Auschwitz. I also think it has had a significant impact on Polish culture and history as I had mentioned in a previous blog that the Holocaust wiped out ten per cent of Poland’s total population over sixty years ago. Although I had tried to get myself mentally prepared for the trip I still felt anxious about how it would impact me.
If
I’m honest I was disappointed with how commercial Auschwitz had become. On one
hand I would not have had the opportunity to experience the death camp if it
had not been open to the public on such a huge scale (nearly seven thousand
visitors a day) however; the shops and queues of people distracted me from
being fully absorbed by my surroundings. On the other hand our tour guide
challenged our group through asking difficult questions and kept us focused on
the cruelty people suffered. The first question she asked which stuck with me
was why we had chosen to visit Auschwitz, rather than the seven other camps in Poland,
where just as many or more had died. She said that Auschwitz’s popularity was
due to its survivors. In Auschwitz there had been over forty thousand
survivors, whereas Belzec had only two and others ranged from between a hundred
to ten. This meant more people could tell their stories, making Auschwitz the
best known of the camps. This information made me look at old people from
Poland in a whole new light as someone over ninety could have lived through the
First World War, Second World War and the Cold War!
Over
the day we visited Auschwitz 1 and 2 (Birkenau).
Birkenau kept around one hundred
thousand workers, both men and women, with a separate block for children. The
beds seen in the pictures held eight people or more and prisoners were given
less than eight hundred calories a day. They woke at 5am and worked until late,
with two toilet trips during the day. We were told their life span in the camp
was around two or three months. The guide also told us no survivors ever
mentioned seeing any children in the camp, even though some were kept for a
short period of time. I found entering the children’s block to be one of the
most difficult parts of my visit to Auschwitz because it was hard to even
believe. Something I didn’t know was that many Polish children with blue eyes
and blonde hair were sent to Germany to be “Germanised.” The guide told us that
after the war less than ten per cent of these children returned to Poland
because they were too young to remember. 
They
also kept some families together in separate areas (living there for six months),
so they could manipulate them into writing letters to family and friends at
home, convincing them to come to such concentration camps where they would have
a ‘better’ life. Throughout the Second World War it was evident that Hitler planned
to wipe out other races and within Auschwitz alone a single S.S. Doctor could
sterilise up to a thousand Jewish girls a day. 
It
is important that people do experience these death camps, or even watch movies
about the Holocaust as it is apparent how evil humanity can be when ‘mislead.’
The camp showed me how easily people can be manipulated to believe something,
as well how much they are willing to ignore. One quotation by George Santayana
really stood out to me from the visit (shown in the picture.) This experience
surrounded an aspect of Polish history that I will always remember.
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