While planning the 10 days of Spring Break, I had difficulty choosing a third stop. My main goals of this semester were to go to Paris, London, Barcelona, Rome, and Venice. Everything else would be a bonus. I had already traveled to the first one at the beginning of the semester; and I can easily say that Paris is my favorite city in all of Europe. Then Spring Break already had London and Barcelona on the agenda, and I am going to visit Rome during Easter. So, a had a few days at the end of the trip to play around with. I honestly don’t remember how or why I thought of it but I realized that it was quite cheap and a very good possibility of going to Krakow, Poland. I am not Polish, at all. I think I have had one Polish food item in my entire life: pierogies.

     My interest in Poland was not for it’s cute little town of Krakow, but a place an hour and a half away from there: Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. I remember quite vividly in 7th grade reading Night by Elie Wiesel. I had read Anne Frank and Number the Stars in previous classes, but something really struck me in Night. I remember that towards the end of the book about a concentration camp in the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel recounted, a Holocaust survivor, a memory of being dragged out of the concentration camps when the Allies started invading. The S.S. Officers had these innocent “prisoners” literally run out of the camp. They were all on the brink of death due to the cold, starvation, and disease that constantly knocked at their door. But that didn’t stop the officers from having these men run 40 miles without stopping. If they slowed down or began to walk during any of it they would be shot on the spot, and left on the side of the road to die. I don’t know if 40 miles is an exaggeration but that didn’t matter to me. I believe myself to be well nourished and slightly in shape, I try to workout 3-4 times a week, However I know for a fact that if you currently had me run over 2 miles there is no way I could get past the second mile without stopping. And this is in the best case scenario. I have been sleeping in a sanitary home, been fed 3 or more full meals a day, and have access to healthcare. I can not imagine someone putting a gun to my head and telling me to run almost twice the length of a marathon without proper nutrition, adequate sleep, shoes, and overall mental health.

     I know there are even more horrific stories regarding the Holocaust than this. But for some reason this one really resonated with me and made me extremely eager to educate myself further on the atrocities inflicted on humankind during that time. I remember reading as many books as I could on it in grade school, and I continually am searching for documentaries on Netflix.

     If you didn’t already know, I am a psychology major. I chose to apply to college my senior year of high school with this intended major, because of the AP Psychology class I was taking at the time. I always knew I wanted to be a doctor but almost all the science classes I had taken, leading up to that point, were all the same to me. I didn’t mind biology or chemistry. I did however despise physics. I have completed all my physics requirements, taking 2 courses in college, and I have not changed at all. I am currently studying for the MCAT here, scheduled to take it in June, and nothing makes me more angry than the fact that I have to study physics all over again. I seriously just do not understand it, and do not think I ever will.

     Sorry for the tangent, just a little window to my soul. Anyway, the point of all of that was: I choose to be a psychology major after learning about schizophrenia. I am still to this day, perplexed by the incredible effects of this disease on one’s mind. It is nothing like any other psychiatric disorder. And I could go on and on about that. But I found out that I could apply to college as a Psychology Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience, and I could have not been more thrilled. I am actually planning to graduate with that degree this fall, and am so happy that I stuck to that degree. I think that my interest in the Holocaust also unconsciously helped me choose my major due to the psychological mysteries of how and why people did the things they did. And the amazement of how so many disgusting events were able to take place, that never should have even been a thought that crossed in one’s mind.

     So, I was ecstatic to visit the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. I actually looked forward to it all week, as much as I did to going to Harry Potter World. I have been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. twice and that is probably one of my favorite museums in this world. If you are interested in history, or want to experience something earth shattering, I highly suggest visiting this museum if you have not already done so.

     Below are my notes and experiences from the two camps. I did not take any pictures while inside the camps so that I could focus all my attention on the tour and try to put myself in the shoes of the victims and survivors of the unimaginable travesty millions of innocent lives were lost to.

     From the words of the tour guide, these are the notes I wrote to myself on the bus back recording all that I remembered.

Auschwitz was only a men’s camp, much smaller than Birkenau. It was not as primitive as I had imagined. It looked to me as kind of like a little town with multicolored brick buildings that from the outside looked like functional homes; if you didn’t know the history.

     Inside the barracks of the prisoners there were about 6 toilets for a house full of 800 to 1,000 men in each. The guards only allowed prisoners to use the bathroom for 10 seconds to tops a minute. Outside of the bathrooms were pictures of hundreds of prisoners that had lived there. Instead of being identified by being tattooed with a number on their arm, they were photographed. It was a black and white photograph taken after their arrival to the camp. At the bottom there were two dates: the day they arrived at the camp and the day they “died”. The day they died was an account of the day they were murdered. I just want to clarify that. Several people had the exact same day that they died, obviously accounting for a mass murder.

     Each person had their own picture, and no matter if you were male or female – your head was shaved and your skin was extremely dirty. You all wore the same striped prisoner/pajama outfit, and it was actually extremely difficult to differentiate the women from the men. I distinctively remember seeing a set of twins, young boys with their pictures right next to eachother and looked extremely alike. They had the same last name and looked identical in age. Several people photographed looked extremely similar to some of my friends and family back home. This made my stomach turn. This could have been them. If I had been born at the wrong place and the wrong time, I could have lived through this. It was extremely powerful to see the faces of just a small percentage of the victims. It hit even harder to home, when I was able to truly see these people as individuals, rather than a huge group was was exterminated. The thing that made me the most upset was that every single picture had a day that they died, no one from this group survived.

Here are some more notes from that day, if I elaborated on each one this post would never get done:

 – Only women that were there were used as “guinea pigs” in sterilization experiments of their reproductive organs. Hundreds died due to the after effects of these surgeries.

St. Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest that took a lethal injection in the place of another prisoner – to save his life because he was the father of 5.

 

     I saw an original gas chamber still in the same state as it was when used. And it was extremely hard for me to be in. The entire time,  I was picturing what happened in it when the “Zylon? B” chemical was dropped in, and the hundreds of people packed in who thought they were taking showers started to suffocate. I was consumed by their probable last words, thoughts, actions. Who they were with as they perished, for the 15 – 40 minutes on average it took them to die.

      I kept picturing family members, if they had beaten the odds and weren’t separated at that point, screaming out and holding onto one another. I kept seeing little children grabbing onto their grandmothers, for the young and old were murdered first right off the train together. I could see them all vulnerable, being naked and bald. They were stripped and heads shaved before the showers. Their clothes sold off and hair used to stuff things like German pillows.

     It was exactly what I had imagined, primitive, and deplorable living conditions. This camp was comprised of ruins of the gas chambers and barracks of the women prisoners. Birkenau was started as a woman’s work camp. But, Roma gypsies were there too because there was debate at the time of whether they were a “subhuman race” or not like the Poles and Jews. An experimental doctor did studies on them because they acquired “water cancer” as a side effect of starvation. The S.S. believed they were “subhuman” because of their facial features – it reminded me of phrenology by Joseph Gall.

     Another type of experimentation was housed here, twin studies.  I thought the twin studies were disgusting, but so interesting as a psychology major. I have had heard about them before but was never immersed in the actual history like I was there. The twin studies did autopsies on the twins almost immediately after sorting when came off the train. Sets of twins were separated from the rest of their families right away to be used in experiments; to see if there was a difference in their anatomy. This was thought to be a way to discover how to produce multiple births through experimentation to expand the German race further at a faster rate. They also would do things to one twin and see if it would affect the other in a similar way without physically touching the other. Experimentally trying to see whether identical twins experienced the same feelings with only one experiencing a stimulus compared to that of fraternal. And also one of the most famous was seeing if they could alter eye color through barbaric practices.

     There were 3 levels of bunks in the women’s barracks. These became symbolic of the circle of life within the camp.

     The top of the 3 levels of bunks was the best because human waste only travels downwards. Therefore, if you were strong you would be on the top bunk.

     The weak with early stages of illness slept on the second bunk.

     When you became delusional and had diarrhea, due to many diseases and starvation you would be placed on the bottom bunk and would wait for inevitable death. At this point you would have no possible chance for survival on this level. Witness accounts of survivors said that this just became the way of life for them to see on a daily basis. It wasn’t even that upsetting when someone went down to the bottom bunk.

     During the architectural planning of Birkenau, the designers made the camp completely flat to terminate any possible chance of escape. This was because prisoners could then not hide in the shadows at any point. However, the team at Auschwitz were not so lucky.

     My favorite part of the whole trip was finding out that 200 people escaped from Auschwitz. This number to me is so few, because when one prisoner went missing 10 people were chosen at random to take the punishment of the escapee and starve to death. I personally thought that this was a great number, because I think that even one life is worth moving mountains for.