Mohit Malhan’s Blog

I am going to discuss my personal views about the Auschwitz Concentration Camp through this post.  It was during May 2009, when I was traveling to Poland along with my team from UTD, I got an opportunity to travel one of the World Heritage Site, The Auschwitz Birkenau. As student back in Gujarat,  I always used to memorize each and every thing that used to come in social studies, may it be history, economics, civics etc…and I am sure every one of us have been through the history of both World Wars at one or the other stage.

Auschwitz Concentration Camp was a concentration camp that was been set up in Poland after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939.

Hitler always thought that Jews were the one because of whom Germany was defeated in the First World War, and he took all the Jews to be one of the principal adversaries of Germany.

Auschwitz was a death camp which has witnessed death of 3 million people in it most of them where Jews. Most victims were killed in Auschwitz gas chambers; other deaths were caused by systematic starvation, forced labor, lack of disease control, individual executions, and purported “medical experiments”.

It is very important to understand the construction of this concentration camp to realize how horrifying it might have been to be inside the camp. Please refer the following link for an audio-video description for the construction of the camp. (Auschwitz)

After invading Poland, Germany had set up several concentration camps to slaughter the Jews and Auschwitz was the biggest of them.

All the Jews (referred as shipment) were been transported to the camp from all around the country by the death gate termed as “gate to hell”

Picture on right displays the view from inside the camp.  Jews were been transported inside the camp through this tracks.

A sign over the entrance to the camp read ARBEIT MACHT FREI, which means “work makes one free.” In actuality, the opposite was true. Labor became another form of genocide that the Nazis called “extermination through work.”

Each day was a struggle for survival under unbearable conditions. Prisoners were housed in primitive barracks that had no windows and were not insulated from the heat or cold. There was no bathroom, only a bucket. Each barrack held about 36 wooden bunkbeds, and inmates were squeezed in five or six across on the wooden plank. As many as 500 inmates lodged in a single barrack.

Inmates were always hungry. Food consisted of watery soup made with rotten vegetables and meat, a few ounces of bread, a bit of margarine, tea, or a bitter drink resembling coffee. Diarrhea was common. People weakened by dehydration and hunger fell easy victim to the contagious diseases that spread through the camp.

Victims who were spared immediate death by being selected for labor were systematically stripped of their individual identities. They had their hair shaved off and a registration number tattooed on their left forearm. Men were forced to wear ragged, striped pants and jackets, and women wore work dresses. Both were issued ill-fitting work shoes, sometimes clogs. They had no change of clothing and slept in the same clothes they worked in.

At Auschwitz children were often killed upon arrival. Children born in the camp were generally killed on the spot. Near the end of the war, in order to cut expenses and save gas, cost-accountant considerations led to an order to place living children directly into the ovens or throw them into open burning pits.

Women were not been spared either, they were been subjected to the various biological experiements been conducted over them by the German group of doctors. In December 1942, Professor Carl Clauberg came to the death camp Auschwitz and started his medical experimental activities. He injected chemical substances into wombs during his experiments. Thousands of Jewish and Gypsy women were subjected to this treatment. They were sterilized by the injections, producing horrible pain, inflamed ovaries, bursting spasms in the stomach, and bleeding. The injections seriously damaged the ovaries of the victims, which were then removed and sent to Berlin.

The photo on the left displays the group toilets “latrines” that prisoners used.

Escape from Auschwitz was almost impossible. Electrically charged barbed-wire fences surrounded both the concentration camp and the killing center. Guards, equipped with machine guns and automatic rifles, stood in the many watchtowers. The lives of the prisoners were completely controlled by their guards, who on a whim could inflict cruel punishment on them. Prisoners were also mistreated by fellow inmates who were chosen to supervise the others in return for special favors by the guards.

About 700 prisoners attempted to escape from the Auschwitz camps during the years of their operation, of which about 300 were successful. A common punishment for escape attempts was death by starvation; the families of successful escapees were sometimes arrested and interned in Auschwitz and prominently displayed to deter others. If someone did manage to escape, the SS would pick ten random people from the prisoner’s block and starve them to death.

Internet Footnotes:

About Nazism:  www.nazism.net

Online Encyclopedia: Wiki

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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