Part IV, Poland with Habitat for Humanity - Auschwitz and Birkenau, July 3, 2011

No building today, instead we went to the former concentration camps and museums at Auschwitz and Birkenaeau.

The large building is now the museum entrance and auditorium where we watched a 17 minute movie introducing us to the camps.

This sign showed some of the pictures drawn to show prisoners (those healthy enough to not be executed) marching to work and those prisoners who were musicians and were kept alive to play music in the camp orchestra.

This is a photo of the inmate orchestra playing for the guards.

These are the standard prison buildings that housed 800 - 1000 prisoners each.  They had originally been built as barracks for a military base.

 

 

This map of Europe showed where prisoners and those to be executed where shipped in from - Athens was the furthest at 2150 KM and taking 10-11 days.

Here are some of the stats of the camp.

 

 

I  have visited Dachau (near Munich) in the late 1960s and again in 2006. Auschwitz is much larger, and Birkeneau is about 6-7 times as big as Auschwitz. While our tour continued, we were not allowed to take any more pictures.

After visiting both camps, we were soaked. It was a cold, rainy day - our tour guide said it was the coldest, rainiest summer day he had ever seen. The temp was about 55 and the wind was blowing constantly. It was nice to get inside to have lunch.

This was a very sobering experience - it is hard to believe that people could do the things we saw, from medical experiments, to removing gold and silver fillings from teeth, to shaving heads to get the hair to use in manufacturing.  It was gruesome.  Seeing things like this make me wonder how anyone can deny the Holocaust.