Auschwitz II-Birkenau

The first thing you notice is the space. Flat ground runs out to the treeline on every side. Wind crosses it with nothing to stop it. Underfoot there is gravel, then rough grass, then the cold iron of a railway track. Above all of this stand rows of brick chimneys, hundreds of them, rising from foundations where wooden barracks once stood. In winter, frost settles on the wire. In summer, the birch trees at the far edge move and rustle. This is Birkenau. Please walk slowly here.

Birkenau is the German name for the Polish village of Brzezinka. The name comes from the birch trees that still grow around the site. Nazi Germany occupied this part of Poland in 1939. The German authorities forced the villagers out of their homes and took the land. Construction of a new camp began in the autumn of 1941. It sat about three kilometres from the original Auschwitz camp, in the town the Germans called Auschwitz and the Poles call Oświęcim.

At first the plan was a camp for Soviet prisoners of war. Within months, its purpose changed. Birkenau became the largest part of the whole Auschwitz complex. It became the place where the Nazi state carried out the mass murder of Europe's Jews on an industrial scale. Historians estimate that around 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz. About one million of them were Jews. Poles, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners, and people of many other nationalities also died here.

Look back at the long brick building with its central tower. Survivors called it the Gate of Death. A single railway line runs straight through its arch and into the camp. That track was extended inside the fence in the spring of 1944. The SS was preparing for the deportation of Hungary's Jews. In only a few months that year, more than four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were brought to Auschwitz. Most of them were killed within hours of arrival.

Now look along the rails to the platform beside them. This is the ramp. Here, trains of freight wagons opened after journeys of days, sometimes more than a week, with little water and no air. SS doctors and officers stood on this ground and carried out what they called selection. A small number of people were sent into the camp for forced labour. The elderly, the sick, mothers, and almost all children were sent directly to the gas chambers.

A single wooden freight wagon now stands on the tracks. It is one of the wagons of the type used for deportations. Many visitors stop here for a long time. It is worth noticing its size. Families, neighbours, and strangers were crowded inside wagons like this one, with their luggage. Many people did not survive the journey itself. Photographs taken by the SS in 1944, now known as the Auschwitz Album, show this exact ramp, crowded with arriving people.

Turn to the barracks. To one side, a few wooden buildings still stand. Many of them were built from a prefabricated design that was originally intended as a stable for horses. Inside, there was little heat and almost no sanitation. Each building held far more people than it was designed for. Prisoners slept in tiers of wooden bunks, several people to a level. On the other side of the camp are brick barracks, where women prisoners were held in similar conditions.

The chimneys you see across the fields are what remain of the wooden barracks. Most of the wooden structures were taken apart after the war. Their materials were taken away, partly by local people who had lost their own homes during the war. Only the brick stoves and chimneys stayed. This explains the strange landscape here today... a field of chimneys with no houses. Each chimney once stood in a building full of prisoners.

At the far end of the ramp lie the ruins of two large crematoria with gas chambers. Two more stood further into the camp, near the trees. In the autumn of 1944, as the Soviet army approached, the SS began to destroy them to hide the evidence. They used explosives. What you see now are collapsed concrete roofs, broken steps, and underground rooms open to the sky. The museum has deliberately left them as they were found.

One of these buildings was destroyed in a different way. On 7 October 1944, prisoners of the Sonderkommando revolted. These were Jewish prisoners whom the SS forced to work in the crematoria. They set fire to Crematorium IV and fought the guards with improvised weapons. Most of them were killed. Women prisoners had smuggled gunpowder to them from a munitions factory. Several of these women were later hanged. This revolt is one of the clearest acts of resistance in the camp's history.

Between the ruins of the crematoria stands the International Monument to the Victims. It was unveiled in 1967. In front of it, a row of plaques carries the same message in many languages, including Yiddish, Romani, Polish, and English. The text calls the site a cry of despair and a warning to humanity. Near the woods are small ponds. Ashes of victims were dumped in them and in the surrounding ground. Visitors often leave stones or candles here.

Deeper in the camp is a building known as the Central Sauna. New prisoners were stripped, shaved, disinfected, and tattooed with numbers here. Today it holds an exhibition. At the end is a wall of family photographs. Deported families carried these pictures with them, and many were found after the war. Nearby was the area prisoners called Kanada. The SS stored stolen belongings there. Prisoners chose that name because Canada sounded like a land of wealth.

The Soviet army reached Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. A few thousand sick and exhausted prisoners were still alive in the camps. Days earlier, the SS had forced tens of thousands of others on death marches to the west. Today, 27 January is marked around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Polish parliament created the State Museum here in 1947. In 1979, UNESCO placed the site on its World Heritage List.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment. Listen to the wind in the grass and the birches. Look again at the line of the railway, running straight to the ruins and ending there. Survivors returned here for decades to tell what happened, so that the world would not forget. As you walk back toward the gate, you carry a small part of that memory with you. That is the purpose of this place.