My Trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland

One of the most memorable places in Poland was our trip to the Auschwitz’s-Birkenau concentration camp about 1.5 hours outside of Krakow. We learned a lot and saw things that are hard to imagine. This is what I learned from our guide.


From 1939-1945 Nazi Germany sent millions of people to concentration and death camps. One of the biggest ones was Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland. A concentration camp is a place where the Nazis forced millions of people to hard work and live with hardly any food or water. These people were not intended to survive. The first people who were sent were soviet political prisoners and progressed to the attempted extermination of the Jewish people in Europe.


By the end of World War II, the Nazis had killed over 1.3 million people, mostly Jewish,  at the Auschwitz camp alone. They took people from their homes and lied about relocating them just to send them to their deaths. They were loaded into train cars with no windows for air, no food, no water, and no bathrooms. Many people died on the journey and were left inside the cars with the other passengers. When they arrived at the Birkenau train platforms,  the people were sorted by a Nazi doctor who told them either to go right or left. What they didn’t know is that they were either going to be sent to hard work or straight to the gas chambers. The people who were sent to the gas chambers were told they were going to take a shower after the long journey. Instead of showering they were thrown in the gas chambers to be killed after only 25 minutes. 


After they all were killed, the soldiers went in and cut off their hair, took out their gold fillings in their teeth if they had them, and then burned the bodies in a crematorium. The hair was they cut of was sold to German companies to make ‘hair cloth’ for blankets and clothes. In Auschwitz we saw all the hair in massive quantities as well as pots, pans, suitcases and shoes from the prisoners. If you were sent to work you worked all day without much food, water, or bathrooms. If you were sick, injured, too old to work, or too young, you immediately were killed when you arrived. The ones who managed to escape (which was very rare) told people what the Germans were doing. Nobody wanted to believe that these awful things were happening so they just ignored it until it was too late. 


The living conditions were also extremely poor. The prisoners had to sleep in overcrowded, unsanitary barracks on the floor with a light layer of straw but later on they had small mattresses and a thin blanket. During the winters the temperatures could go down to -25 degrees C and the cruelty didn’t stop there. The Nazis viewed the prisoners as less than human. The soldiers wouldn’t refer to prisoners with their names, but were referred to as numbers. This taking away of their identity was all apart of the Nazis plan to make them easier to control and take over. Even if they tried to speak up the prisoners would be punished by being beaten up, sent to the gas chambers, isolated, given no food, or hung. What the Nazis did was one of the most horrible events in history. 


I can’t believe that what happened at Auschwitz was only 80 years ago.  We need to remember what happened in the past so it wont repeat in the future. 

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