To understand what connects such seemingly incompatible words as a museum, concentration camps, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Auschwitz, it is necessary to realize one of the most terrible and tragic stages in the history of mankind.
Auschwitz is a complex of concentration camps that was located during the war in the area of the city of Auschwitz. Poland lost this city in 1939, when at the beginning of hostilities it was annexed to German territory and was called Auschwitz.
Birkenau is the second German death camp located in the village of Brzezinka, where more than a million people were tortured.
In 1946, the Polish authorities decided to organize an open-air museum on the territory of Auschwitz, and in 1947 it was opened. The museum itself is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. The Auschwitz Museum is visited by about two million people a year.
First Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp was located on the southern side of Poland forty-five kilometers from the city of Krakow. It was the largest death camp for the massacre of people. Here, 1 million 100 thousand people died from 1940 to 1945, among whom 90% were people of Jewish nationality. Auschwitz has become synonymous with genocide, cruelty, and hatred.
Having become the Chancellor of Germany, A. Hitler promised to restore the German people to their former power, and at the same time deal with the dangerous racial enemy - the Jews. In 1939, units of the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. More than 3 million Jews were in the territory controlled by the German army.
In 1940, the first concentration camp for political prisoners Auschwitz-1 was built on the site of the former barracks of the Polish army. Immediately the people who make up the Polish elite go to the camp: doctors, politicians, lawyers, scientists. By the fall of 1941, 10 thousand prisoners of war of the Soviet army joined political prisoners.
Auschwitz prison conditions
The Auschwitz Museum stores as evidence secretly painted drawings on the walls of the barracks, indicating the conditions of detention and living in the camp.
The prisoners huddled in twenty-four brick huts, where they slept two in extremely narrow bunks. The diet consisted of a piece of bread and a bowl of watery stew.
Anyone who violated the established camp system would face brutal beating by prison guards. Considering the Poles to be representatives of the lower race, the guard could humiliate, strike, or kill. Auschwitz's task is to sow terror among the entire Polish population. The entire camp area around the perimeter was fenced with a double fence with barbed wire connected to an electric current.
Still control over the prisoners was carried out by criminal prisoners, who were brought from German camps. They were called kapo. These were people who did not know sympathy or compassion.
Life in the camp depended directly on the place of distribution. Snapped up was indoor work. Work on the street, under the blows of kapo, is a death sentence. Any misconduct is the road of death to block No. 11. Those arrested, kept in the basement, were beaten, starved, or simply left to die. They could have been sent to one of four standing cells for the night. The Auschwitz Museum has kept these torture chambers.
There were also cameras for political prisoners. They were brought from all over the region. Auschwitz Museum has preserved the wall of death, located in the courtyard of the block. Here, up to 5 thousand people were executed per day. Patients who were hospitalized but did not have time to quickly get to their feet were killed by an SS doctor. It was supposed to feed only those who could work. In two years, the future Auschwitz museum claimed the lives of more than ten thousand Polish prisoners. Poland will never forget these atrocities.
Second Auschwitz
In October 1941, near the village of Birkenau, the Nazis established a second camp, originally intended for prisoners of war of the Soviet army. Auschwitz-2 was 20 times larger and had 200 barracks for prisoners. Now part of the wooden barracks has collapsed, but the stone pipes of the furnaces have been preserved by the Auschwitz Museum. The winter decision in Berlin regarding the Jewish question changed the purpose of the appointment. Now Auschwitz-2 was intended for the mass killings of Jews.
But at first he did not play a significant role in the massacres, but was used as a place for the deportation of Jews from the captured southern, northern, Scandinavian and Balkan countries. Later it became the largest death machine.
In the summer of 1942, Jews and other prisoners began arriving in Birkenau from all over occupied Europe. Their landing was made six hundred meters from the main gate. Later, to speed up the killing process, the rails were laid to the barracks themselves. Arriving passengers went through the selection process, which determined who would work and who in the gas chamber, and then in the Auschwitz furnace.
Having put together the belongings, the doomed were divided into two groups: men and women with children. After some time, their fate was decided. Part of able-bodied young prisoners was sent to a labor camp, and the bulk of people, including children, pregnant women, the elderly and the disabled, went to gas chambers, and then to the crematorium furnace. The selection process itself was captured by an unknown SS officer in the form of photographic material, although an order from above prohibited the shooting of mass killings.
When Jews from all over Europe arrived in Birkenau in 1942, there was only one gas chamber in the camp, which was installed in the cottage. But the advent of four new gas chambers in 1944 turned Auschwitz-2 into the worst place of massacres.
The productivity of crematoria reached one and a half thousand people a day. And although a few days before the arrival of the Red Army troops, the Auschwitz furnaces were blown up by the Germans, one of the pipes of the crematorium furnace remained intact. It is still preserved in the museum. Poland also intends to restore wooden barracks that have been burned or destroyed over time.
Auschwitz Survival
Survival in the camp depended on a combination of different factors: the instinct of self-preservation, connections, luck, tricks when calling nationality, age and profession. But the main condition for survival was the ability to organize everything related to barter: sell, buy, get food. It was important to get into a good working group, for example, in the B2G sector.
There were belongings of new prisoners. Naturally, all the most valuable things were sent to Germany, but, working here, it was possible with great risk to life something valuable hidden in things - a gold ring, a diamond, money - exchanged for food on the camp black market or used to bribery of the SS men.
Labor makes free
All prisoners passing through the main entrance of the death camp saw what was written on the gates of Auschwitz. In German, this means: "Labor makes free."
What is written on the gates of Auschwitz is the height of cynicism and lies. Labor will never free a person who was initially sentenced to death in a concentration camp. Only death itself or, in rare cases, escape.
The first gas chambers
The first experiments with gas chambers in Auschwitz were conducted in September 1941. Then hundreds of Soviet and Polish prisoners were sent to the basement of Block 11 and were killed by poison - a pesticide based on Cyclone-B cyanide. Now the Auschwitz camp, which was no different from many other camps, took the first step to become an important link in resolving the Jewish question.
When the deportation of the Jews began, supposedly for the resettlement of the new arrivals to the east, they were driven into the former premises of the ammunition depots, which were located away from the main camp. The doomed were told that they had been brought to work, thereby helping Germany; but first you need to get disinfected. The victims were sent to a gas chamber equipped with a shower room. The Cyclone-B crystals fell in through the hole in the roof.
Prisoner evacuation
In 1944, the territory of Auschwitz was a network of camps that sent more than ten thousand people daily to the construction of a German chemical plant. Work in more than forty camps has been used in various fields: construction, agriculture, industry.
By mid-1944, the Third Reich was in jeopardy. Alarmed by the swift offensive of the Soviet troops, the Nazis dismantled and blew up the crematoriums, hiding traces of crimes. The camp was empty, the evacuation of prisoners began. On January 17, 1945, 50 thousand prisoners passed along Polish roads. They were driven to Germany. Thousands of barefoot and half-naked people died from frost on the way. The prisoners, exhausted and behind the convoy, were shot by guards. It was a death march for prisoners at Auschwitz camp. The concentration camp museum keeps portraits of many of them in the corridors of the barracks.
Exemption
A few days after the evacuation of prisoners, Soviet troops entered Auschwitz. About seven thousand half-dead prisoners, exhausted and sick were found in the camp. They simply did not have time to shoot: there was not enough time. These are living witnesses of the genocide of the Jewish people.
In the battles for the liberation of Auschwitz, 231 soldiers of the Red Army were killed. They all found peace in the mass grave of this city.
They survived Auschwitz
January 17 marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the fascist camp Auschwitz. But even today the prisoners of the camp who survived all the horrors of genocide are still alive.
Zdizslava Volodarchik: “I found a hut where they kept me and other children. Bedbugs, lice, rats. But I survived Auschwitz. ”
Claudia Kovacic: “I spent three years in the camp. Constant hunger and cold. But I survived Auschwitz. ”
From June 1940 to January 1945, 400 thousand children were destroyed. This should not be repeated.
