Auschwitz-Birkenau

We ride a mini-bus a couple of kilometers across a bridge to Auschwitz II-Birkenau.  This camp came into existence in fall of 1941, a monumental addition to Kl I and built by prisoner labor from Auschwitz I. The sick from Auschwitz I were transported to death here too. The  trains ended at the ramp, transports of human cargo were divided left and right---the vast majority of people going directly to eventually 4 huge gas chambers and crematoria. Birkenau was the major center for the extermination of the European Jews. The smaller number that survived a preliminary "selection" at the ramp went to slave labor, suffering extreme heat and cold crowded in the bunks of wooden barracks, dying from starvation, disease and work.

Today, on a May morning, the terrain is a deceptively quiet, low-laying plain (the Germans had cleared the villages and expelled the Polish population). Some students have difficulty grasping what went on here. I remind them to imagine this open space roiling with people---prisoners, guards, dogs moving at a fever pitch when each transport arrived, a shrieking and crying din, and then suddenly quiet until the next transport arrived. Day and night, hot summer and freezing winter. 
Plaques at the site of the crematoria memorialize those who perished here; in communist times, the language was "victims of fascism". Today the language recognizes that the majority of victims suffered because they were Jews, regardless of country of origin.