The trip to Oswiecim, the polish town where the Nazis set up their largest concentration camp is only about 50km west of Krakow, so although we knew the experience would be sobering and not a lot of fun, we felt we needed to experience firsthand the horrors that occured there during the second world war. This memorial is a world heritage site and is free to the public, most likely to make the experience available to the widest spectrum of people.
What happened at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II, (Birkenau) simply defy all realms of human decency and by visiting the sites and being exposed to the horrific details, which I won't go into here, the hope is that the world will not allow a madman like Hitler to gain control of a country and its forces ever again. My opinion is that if we ignore history, we can never hope to learn from it.
Auschwitz I started as a prison camp for POW's and polish political prisoners in 1939, after the germans defeated polish forces trying to repel the invasion by the Nazis. The Nazis incorporated the area around Oswiecim into the 3rd Reich, cleared the entire area of its population, and used materials from the towns buildings to build the camp. The camp eventually expanded in its scope and cruelty and was the site of the "medical experiments" on detainees and also the site of the development of the use of Cyclon B, the cyanide compound that was used in the gas chambers. Auschwitz I also had one "temporary" gas chamber in which thousands died. Birkenau, about 3km down the road from Oswiecim, was the killing factory. Situated on 425 acres of ground hundreds of wooden and brick buildings with dirt floors were built to house Jews and others brought in by the Germans on trains, while they waited to be led to the gas chambers. Over a million people died at Birkenau before the Germans torched the camp in front of the advancing Soviet army near the end of the war in 1945.
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