Venues

WAR AND REMBRANCE IN POLAND - FALL OF 2004
Photo Galleries of: Poland

I spent nearly two weeks in this surprising country. I was quite in awe with the beauty offered by the city of Warsaw. Visiting the city in 2004 was also special as the city was commemorating the 60 th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, one of the most heroic episodes of the Second World War. Here the Polish home army battled the Nazis for more than two months within the capital, without any outside help, albeit the Soviet Army was only a few miles away.

The Nazis managed to turn 84% of the city to rubble in 1944, as Hitler had ordered Warsaw raised to the ground. It is inspiring to see how the Polish people have lovingly rebuilt their capital, brick by brick, bit by bit and keeping to the original details of various building styles from 5 centuries.

The city is extremely clean and well organized and the Polish people are quite competent when it comes to service. It is quite interesting to note that they all look rather dour and serious; but as soon as you say a friendly hello all the sour stucco faces blend into quite friendly expressions. The centuries have not been kind to Poland and that is reflected in the heavy character of its inhabitants.

I also visited the few vestiges left of what once was the Warsaw Ghetto, a place that held 400,000 people in the most appalling, inhuman living conditions. Extreme overcrowding, rampant disease and the bitter cold during winters were common. Food was in such short supply that many people slowly starved to death. On April 19, 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began as German troops and police tried to deport its remaining inhabitants. 750 fighters fought the heavily armed and well-trained Germans. The resistance held out for nearly a month until the Nazis crushed them. Of the more than 56,000 Jews captured, about 7,000 were shot, and the rest were deported to the death camps.

Not much is left to remember all those who perished here. Just a few ugly commemorative concrete slabs on some corners, a monument on the Umschlagplatz (collection point) and a huge memorial in typical Stalinist fashion. Of the 700 synagogues that once existed in Warsaw only the Nozyk Synagogue is left.

I went to a small town called Oswiecim in Polish. In all the other languages of the world it is called Auschwitz. First you visit the Auschwitz I camp; originally a Polish Army barracks with solid brick buildings that were taken over by the SS in 1940. Many of these buildings still stand today. They contained mostly the offices of the SS, the medical experimental facilities, torture chambers and some prison quarters. It all looked very neat and tidy and I am sure that it was just as neat and tidy back then, aside from the rats, lice, typhus and the overwhelming sweet smell of death.

Currently some buildings are used as memorials for the many countries that suffered under the Nazi occupation, with the usual photos I have seen hundreds of times. I thought that the displays at the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC were better organized from an educational point of view. Pavilion after pavilion repeated itself with about the same didactic sort of messages, so I thought I might as well have stayed home and watched a good documentary on the Holocaust.

This impression changed radically when I saw the material evidence that is contained in three buildings. I had seen the photos of the piles of glasses and shoes before. However nothing prepares you for the immense quantities of crutches, prostheses, baby clothes, prayer shawls, glasses, suitcases, shoes, combs and brushes displayed here. And to think that these were only the leftovers!

The most disturbing exhibit however turned out to be the 2 tons of human hair removed from victims murdered by the Nazis. When Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz in January 1945, they found bales and bales of human hair ready for shipping; it was sold to German industry and was used as lining in coats that contained 30% human hair. Some of the finished cloth is on display and in combination with the sickening stench of moth balls the sight was even more unbearable. Tests of the hair revealed that it still contained traces of cyanide.

Zyklon B was produced by the Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Schädlingsbekämpfung (German Pest Extermination Society). Whenever I had seen documentaries about the Holocaust they usually show you a token tin of Zyklon-B and some of the poison crystals it contained. At Auschwitz hundreds of discarded cans are on display, once again you come to realize the magnitude of the crimes.

At one corner of the camp there is a gas chamber and a very small crematorium, reconstructed after the war, as the Nazis had tried in the last days of the war to conceal the evidence of their crimes by blowing it up. Here the experimental gassing using Zyklon B first took place, on September 3, 1941, when they exterminated 850 prisoners. On that same day my father was able to celebrate his 8 th birthday as my immediate family had fled to Bolivia in 1938. 

Immediately attached to the gas chamber were six ovens, housed in a crematorium known as Krema I. As any good corporate citizen would, the ovens proudly displayed the name of Topf & Sons, the manufacturer in Germany, a firm that finally went bankrupt in 1994.  

I was just leaving the gas chamber as a large group of high school students entered. As groups behave tend to behave like cattle, all these children were entering the gas chamber en masse. The impression was so striking that it brought history to live. A chill went through my body.

After the sickening displays of Auschwitz, I went to Birkenau, about 3 Km from the Main camp. The Birkenau camp, also known as " Auschwitz II" held over 100,000 prisoners in 1944.

What no documentary or book can convey is the sheer size of the facility - it is here were the magnitude of the criminal enterprise really hits you. The camp was about 2.5 kilometers by 2 kilometers large and was divided into several sections and contained over 300 buildings when it was in operation. To give you an approximate idea of size it was comparable to one of the bigger airports I have been at (LAX, Frankfurt or Narita) or half the size of Stanley Park in Vancouver.

I walked first along the ramp where SS physicians carried out selections of new arrivals, visited some of the barracks and the memorials for Jews, Gypsies and so many other human beings slaughtered here. I also walked around the outer parts of the camp, including some displays for the better part of 3 hours and by no means did I see it all.

The efficiency of German industry is very apparent here, as Topf & Sons built much larger, permanent gas chambers connected with very large crematoria, which housed an additional 46 ovens that used coke and human fat as fuel. These were so much larger than the little crematorium in Auschwitz I. Now all what is left are ruins.

Next to the gas chambers are several ponds and areas that contain the remains of about 1.500.000 human beings. I constantly had the feeling that I was desecrating the ground at every step I took.

I also walked along “ Canada” - the storehouses where victims’ belongings were kept, before the goods were sorted and send back to Germany to be distributed to the civilian population. Today rusting cutlery, pots and pans still remain in place, just as they were found. Amongst these objects I saw a lucky horseshoe.

The most touching memorial I saw was at the euphemistically called "Sauna", the delousing room for the prisoners the Nazis wanted to keep, after removing all their possessions, clothes, hair and tattooing numbers into their forearms.

At the end of this building is a memorial wall that displays hundreds of photographs from before the war carried in their luggage by Jewish deportees; normal photos of holidays, weddings, birthdays and other family occasions - here you can really relate to individual persons and the agonizing suffering they went through. Another wall contained only the photographs of a single Jewish family, none of which survived the cold blooded murder; aside from the family name there was no information about their lives, nothing, only the old sepia pictures to remember them by. It was overwhelming. Upon leaving this truly breathtaking place the following words came to mind:

"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties -but right through every human heart -and all human hearts." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago"