Unbelievable

Throughout the world, Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, genocide, and the Holocaust. The German forces occupying Poland during the Second World War established a concentration camp on the outskirts of the town of Oswiecim, in 1940; the Germans called the town Auschwitz and that is the name by which the camp was known. Over the next years it was expanded into three main camps: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz as well as more than forty subcamps. The first people to be brought to Auschwitz as prisoners and murdered were Poles. They were followed by Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, and deportees of many other nationalities. Beginning in 1942, however, Auschwitz became the setting for the most massive murder campaign in history when the Nazis put into operation their plan to destroy the entire Jewish population of Europe. The great majority of Jews who were deported to Auschwitz - men, women, and children - were sent immediately upon arrival to death in the gas chambers of Birkenau. When the SS realized that the end of the war was near, they attempted to remove the evidence of the atrocities committed there. They dismantled the gas chambers, crematoria, and other buildings, burned documents, and evacuated all those prisoners who could walk to the interior of Germany. Those who were not evacuated were liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945.


It's about a 45 minute drive from our house. As we pulled into the town of Oswiecim...better known to the world as Auschwitz...we could already feel the oppression...I already had tears in my eyes...a lump in my throat...a knot in my stomach. It's indescribable. Truly incomprehensible.



This is known as the "death wall" it's where they did the executions


The corpses of prisoners shot while trying to escape were often displayed here as a warning to others.



This used to be the massive gas chamber. Much of Birkenau was destroyed in an effort to hide what they were doing.
About a half-mile straight into the camp the train tracks suddenly end. The thought is too much to bear.