Entering Auschwitz: Reflections on My Visit to a Nazi Concentration Camp

Please note: The following post contains detailed descriptions of torture, genocide, and other violent and heinous acts committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. It was an emotionally taxing yet rewarding piece for me to compose, and some readers may find it disturbing. I would urge visitors to continue reading at their own discretion.

Please also note that most of the factual information contained here was sourced from my two Auschwitz-Birkenau tour guides, informational plaques at the camps, and the official Auschwitz-Birkenau website.

I’ll admit, it may seem a bit macabre to kick off the travel section of my blog with personal impressions of my visit to Auschwitz. But for travelers both young and old, places like Nazi concentration camps can inspire an odd, morbid curiosity. In Auschwitz lies a real, tangible manifestation of the kind of evil that exists on such an unfathomable scale, it is typically conceptualized only in the abstract. Yet a tour of Auschwitz requires us to regard Holocaustal death and torture not as far-removed tragedies tucked neatly within history books, but as sickening realities suffered by actual people. The more-than-a-million visitors who flock to Auschwitz each year are confronted with such chilling artifacts as starvation and suffocation chambers, mountains of round eyeglasses, deteriorating gray hair, and what’s left of the gas chambers and crematoria. Even after an expertly guided tour, however, the whole excursion can seem strangely surreal, the visitor floating stupidly in a mental fog above the scenes of some of history’s darkest atrocities.

At least that was my experience. Visiting a concentration camp had been on my bucket list since I first discovered that seeing Nazi death camps was something that tourists actually did. I planned a trip to Western Europe in the spring of 2018 but decided to incorporate a brief stay in Kraków, Poland for the sole purpose of visiting nearby Auschwitz. In my travels, points of historic interest have always been the most meaningful to me, and particularly places that speak to those dire lessons of history that should never be forgotten. Touring the D-Day beaches of Normandy, France; the ruined shell of the cathedral in Coventry, England; Pearl Harbor in Hawaii; the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima, Japan; Scotland’s Secret Cold War Bunker in Fife; and the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway have been some of the most impactful travel experiences of my life. Auschwitz, however, has probably been the most psychologically jarring, especially as a solo traveler. Here I’ll share my personal reflections of the time I spent at the death camps that constitute Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the two Auschwitz camps open to tourists. I hope this guide can be helpful for those considering a visit, those who have already visited, and those who are simply curious to learn more about Auschwitz.

Entering Auschwitz I Concentration Camp

Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau provides a history lesson like no other. I was collected at my hotel in Kraków by a bus filled with other English-speaking tourists. On the way to Auschwitz I — the main Auschwitz camp, also known as Stammlager — we were shown a disturbing video about the camp’s history. Certain segments stand out in my mind as having left a particularly deep impression. One such example is original footage of camp prisoners who had been subjected to sterilization experiments conducted by the notorious Dr. Mengele (known as the “Angel of Death”) — seeing castrated men with abnormally feminized physiological features and hearing about women who died during hysterectomies performed in unsterile settings with no anesthetic. In addition, the narrator commented that when the Red Army liberated the camp in January of 1945, video footage of the Soviets’ arrival was carefully and artfully staged: The soldiers were depicted as valiant war heroes to champion the Soviet cause in political propaganda. Only about 7,000 prisoners were left at the camp — many of whom died shortly after the arrival of the Soviet forces — while nearly 60,000 were forced by the Nazis to make the infamous “death march” across Poland toward Loslau. Approximately 15,000 didn’t make it to Loslau alive. Another fact in the forefront of my memory is that years after the liberation, it was not uncommon for Holocaust survivors to have an intense, pathological fear of the German language. This video certainly set the tone for the events of the afternoon ahead.

I made the mistake of not having lunch before the tour began and decided to eat at the café located at the entrance to Auschwitz I concentration camp. Not only was my salad thoroughly unappetizing (the white cheese in my Greek salad strangely soft, bland, and unlike feta in taste), but it somehow felt wrong to be consuming food at a site where so many had suffered and died. The whole premises felt oddly contaminated in my mind, down to the air I breathed.

When the tour at last began, we were shuffled through the camp’s iconic entryway, which bears the German slogan Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work sets you free”) — merely one of the Nazis’ numerous expressions of cruel irony. (Of course, visitors who have done their homework will spot the upside down “B” in Arbeit, which was a subtle though meaningful act of rebellion orchestrated by the camp’s inmates.) Beyond the gate were red brick prison blocks placed on a neat grid of dirt roads. They reminded me a bit of student flats. The place seemed quiet and peaceful in the spring sunlight, an impression that somehow struck me as profoundly unsettling. In spite of this deceptive atmosphere of tranquility, we could see, in the gaps around the buildings, the wiry remnants of the electric fence that bordered the camp. It was intended to keep prisoners in, but for some it provided a way out; casting oneself onto the electric fence was a method of suicide commonly utilized by prisoners. Details like these that I picked up from our guide greatly compounded the emotional impact of the tourist experience at Auschwitz.

A short ways into the camp, we came across the gallows (which were reconstructed after the originals were destroyed). A spectacle was made of prisoners’ executions in an effort to intimidate other camp inmates. On April 16, 1947, Rudolf Höss — the longest serving commandant of Auschwitz — was hanged at a gallows constructed specifically for him after his trial. The gallows were located on the roll-call grounds, where prisoners assembled in both the morning and evening. If the numbers didn’t tally up correctly during roll call, they sometimes stood for hours at a time in the frozen winter.

Another notable piece of information I discovered — and one that substantially altered my mental conception of Nazi death camps — was the fact that no one was meant to survive his or her stay at Auschwitz. While it is true that new arrivals at Auschwitz were sometimes spared the lethal Zyklon B fumes of the gas chambers, being selected for survival as a worker simply meant a slower death. Nazi concentration camps were never designed to sustain a workforce; Jews were intended to be literally worked to death and then replaced by new workers. Prisoners were not given enough food to survive. Daily rations consisted of herbal tea or boiled water with a grain-based coffee substitute for breakfast; watery soup for lunch; and a 300-gram piece of black bread with a very meager serving of meat, cheese, margarine, or marmelade for dinner. A nutritionally deficient diet combined with hard labor led to rampant starvation and emaciation and upped the likelihood of being condemned to the gas chambers.

At Auschwitz, human life was reduced to something less even than animal life, which — as I learned as a student of social psychology — is easier to achieve when groups of people are targeted, scapegoated, and subsequently dehumanized. It is difficult for anyone with a conscience to harm or kill someone they have conceptualized as a fellow human being worthy of dignity and respect; so fascist regimes must dehumanize the perceived threat through fear- and hate-mongering tactics in order to cultivate a mindset of apathy, or even sadism, in loyal subjects. Facts become less important to people than the ardor of their feelings, which can cause revisionist histories to be promulgated and upheld with conviction. Loyalty to the cause and blind obedience to authority are prized above all else.

Anyway — after entering Stammlager, my tour group made its way through the premises viewing educational exhibitions on the history of Auschwitz. We saw inmates’ uniforms (which have always struck me as very similar in style to striped pajamas) and photos of men and women with shaved heads. (I at first mistook the women for men because, bald and stonefaced, they bore no semblance of femininity, having largely been stripped of their gender.) The vast majority died within months of their internment. We also learned more about Dr. Mengele’s egregiously unethical medical experimentation, including his fascination with twins and his methods of gaining the trust of his child subjects before murdering them. It is supremely unjust that Dr. Mengele lived into his late 60s, evading capture and trial in South America until his death in 1979.

“Material Evidence of Crime”

Of course, what typically remains seared into the memories of visitors to Auschwitz are images of the hair and personal affects of the victims — or “Material Evidence of Crime,” as they’re labeled — contained in Block 5. When the Nazis realized that the Soviet advance was inevitable, they hastily destroyed as much evidence of their gristly deeds as possible, but many artifacts remained. No photography was allowed in these viewing rooms out of respect for the dead. Tricked into believing that they would receive the opportunity to collect their possessions after a shower, those sent to the gas chambers left behind their eyeglasses and labeled suitcases before inhaling the toxic fumes of Zyklon B, a cyanide-based gas originally used agriculturally as a pesticide. The eyes of tourists to Auschwitz rove over the piles and piles of possessions never reclaimed by their original owners. The shoes (children’s included), artificial limbs, and a small mountain of 75-year-old gray-brown hair is indelibly seared into the mind. The hair was shorn from women’s heads after their murder and stored in paper bags. Human hair totaling 7.7 tons in weight was found at Auschwitz. Much to my horror, my group was informed that human hair from Holocaust victims at Auschwitz was used in the German textile industry. Trace amounts of Zyklon B are present in rugs, socks, army blankets, and car seat cushions and upholstery from this period, indicating that hair from gassed Holocaust victims was turned into a commercial product.

When I toured the Oskar Schindler Factory the day before experiencing Auschwitz, I recoiled at the sight of a cigarette case made from human skin. Again and again, we see acts of gross dehumanization carried out during the Holocaust in which human beings were stripped not only of their lives, but of their dignity as human beings. Viktor Frankl — Auschwitz survivor, Viennese psychiatrist and neurologist, and founding father of existential psychotherapy — notes in his book Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) that no matter how torturous and degrading one’s living conditions may be, he or she always maintains the freedom to choose how to respond to suffering. The prisoner can endeavor to elevate his or her thoughts to a higher spiritual plane by looking ahead to a brighter future or by seeking refuge in memories of a loved one. If the pressures of external reality, however, become too much to endure, meaning in life can become difficult to create, and the spirit can be crushed. Frankl observed that once a fellow prisoner’s hope was extinguished through forces of gross oppression, a kind of perceptible flame was snuffed out, and everyone knew he was doomed to imminent death.

The Nazi operation was as much a sickening mind game as it was corporeal reality; the struggle to survive was often won or lost in the psyche, which could act as a safe haven but could also function as a gateway to death if the prisoners began to see themselves as less than human, as unloved, or as without a future — in other words, if they internalized the values and beliefs of their oppressors or if they simply lost hope. In addition, existing in “survival mode” in which the basic necessities of food, water, warmth, shelter, and personal safety were prioritized meant that there was a constant struggle to live. “Higher” pursuits of knowledge, art, beauty, romance, etc. were limited or nonexistent under such hostile conditions. Prisoners sometimes committed shameful acts, like mistreating other inmates lower in the pecking order so that they might acquire more food or receive some other reward that would enhance their odds of survival.

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison addresses the concept of psychological abuse within the context of American slavery in a way that similarly applies to the slave laborers of the Holocaust: The worst thing that an oppressor can do is “[n]ot just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up.” These words of fiction have always stood out in my mind for the truth they speak. According to Morrison, the basest and most vile form of abuse results in victims not liking the people they become; this is the ultimate transgression one can commit against another person, as it results in stripping individuals of their identities, taking away their freedom to personify their values, and once again dehumanizing them. It is a kind of internal murder. After bearing witness to material evidence of Nazi crimes in Block 5, it was almost beyond comprehension for me to think that the love, hope, or faith in higher ideals that Viktor Frankl found could be sustained in the hell that was Auschwitz, an institution that sought to destroy all shreds of human dignity from its victims.

Additional facts that I learned from my tour guide at Auschwitz I also stand out in my mind. New arrivals at Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp were herded toward an SS official who decided, with a flick of his hand, whether people would be sorted to his left to die immediately in the gas chambers or whether they would be sorted to his right to live (or die more slowly, rather) as camp workers. My group was told that one of the worst positions a prisoner could be assigned was to assist in the processing of gas chamber victims. These workers, called Sonderkommando, would sometimes give new arrivals tips (about what age they should claim to be, their appearance, etc.) to increase their chances of survival. They did not even bother warning the throngs of newly arrived Jews of their fate because doing so would only have incited mass panic. They told newcomers that they would need to undress to be disinfected and to receive a shower. Family, friends, and neighbors were sometimes spotted disembarking from the squalid, overcrowded cattle wagons. Some were recognized only as corpses after their deaths in the gas chambers. One can only imagine the emotional anguish of the Sonderkommando who found themselves in the position of assisting in the destruction of their families and communities. My tour guide told us that workers in this position would sometimes follow their loved ones inside the gas chambers to end their own lives, as well; suicide was the only form of resignation.

Prior to my tour, I was aware of the basic facts of Nazi death camps — of the gas chambers, the shoes, the crematoria, the starvation, the wanton cruelty of the guards — but it was largely the details I learned about these topics that made the experience what it was, that made my blood curdle. Genocide is evil on a massive and semi-abstract scale to those not directly involved in the killing; but recycling dead women’s hair for use in everyday items is a detail so perverse that it adds a new, raw dimension to historical facts like genocide that are otherwise so big or so well-known, they can, perhaps paradoxically, be difficult to grasp. Similarly, assisting in mass-scale executions is one thing, but being complicit in the extermination of your own family, community, culture, and faith because you see no better, realistic alternative for your life seems all together a different kind of matter. So does the general act of suicide vs. choosing death because it seems more appealing than living in the hell that was Auschwitz without those sacred human relationships that make life worth living. Details like these have the power to make real and vivid what was once only conceptualized in the broadest of brushstrokes, which is partly why a visit to Auschwitz means so much more than the kinds of basic facts and statistics typically provided by survey textbooks.

Murderousness vs. Monstrosity

As I’ve indicated, details in themselves were indeed upsetting; but after I was able to more fully process the experience in the hours and days that followed my visit, I saw patterns emerging that helped me make better sense of my lingering feelings of sadness and distress. Something made my visit to Auschwitz profoundly disturbing, and it was more than the fact that Auschwitz was a human slaughterhouse. Of course, it was partly the details I learned about the experiences of those at the camp and the human dimension they imparted. But it was also the critical difference between straightforward murder — or just “following orders” — and deriving actual delight and satisfaction from the torture and death of innocents. I’m sure that many SS guards were not sadistic or sociopathic, as noted by Viktor Frankl. But judging by many of the firsthand accounts of daily life at Auschwitz-Birkenau, too many of them were. The worst of the guards were not merely murderers, but monsters. This is not a mere pedantic distinction, as the difference between murderer and monster is substantial.

I, personally, found my tour of the camp’s torture chambers in Block 11 to be the most disturbing segment of my time at Auschwitz-Birkenau, partly because it so starkly showcased the monstrosity of the Nazi officials. This was another area in which photography was prohibited. My group was led into a series of dark, underground cells in which barbaric punishments were inflicted on those who had in some way challenged Nazi authority (e.g. by engaging in an escape attempt, being selected to die as restitution for someone else’s escape, assisting other escapees, attempting to contact civilians, sabotaging the camp’s regular functioning in some way, etc.). Death by starvation was one such punishment carried out in these cells. Additionally, in the infamous standing cells (Stehzelle), four prisoners would be crammed into a tiny cell only about one square yard in size with a hole approximately two inches square for breathing. These cells had no source of heat, and prisoners would be made to stand in their own excrement. Since there was not always enough oxygen flow to sustain life, inmates would sometimes drop dead of suffocation during the night. The surviving prisoners would then be forced to work a 10-hour day before returning to the standing cell, often for 10 consecutive nights. Brutality, however, was not confined to organized punishments. There are innumerable accounts of inmates, with little or no provocation, being subjected to sporadic beatings and other forms of whimsical violence and humiliation at the hands of SS guards.

Another pattern of monstrosity that struck me during my tour of the camp was the Nazis’ employment of cruel irony — that is, small but insidious flourishes, many of which seem to have been enacted for sole purpose of sadistic amusement. Like rubbing salt in an already fatal wound. As I mentioned before, the phrase Arbeit Macht Frei was one example since work led to death rather than to freedom. Another was the notion of a camp physician, the oxymoronic “Angel of Death,” forsaking medicine’s higher humanitarian ideals to inflict suffering and extinguish life. And when containers of Zyklon B were driven to the gas chambers, they were taken in ambulances bearing Red Cross insignia; new arrivals who spotted them actually believed that these vessels of death would provide medical aid. Furthermore, arrivals to Birkenau sometimes heard camp orchestras performing as they underwent the selection process, heading toward their slaughter. This backdrop of music helped to conceal the fate that awaited them, played by inmates who must have struggled with the idea of using their art to placate their captors and deceive their fellow victims of persecution.

Maximilian Kolbe: Martyr at Auschwitz

Thankfully where there are monsters, there, too, are angels — an idea worth remembering in every instance of mass murder. I was notably moved when, during my walkthrough of the Block 11 torture facilities, I viewed the memorial of Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic priest and martyr at Auschwitz who gave his life for a stranger. Before being sentenced to Auschwitz, Kolbe provided shelter for 2,000 Jewish refugees at his monastery in Poland. He was openly critical of the Nazi cause in his writings and distributed an anti-Nazi radio broadcast, actions which made him a political target. While branded prisoner #16670 at Auschwitz, Kolbe shared his meager rations of food with others, heard confessions, and offered to pray with prisoners before retiring to bed at night. He withstood the staggering blows and psychological torment of SS guards with remarkable calm and forbearance.

In an effort to discourage escape attempts, Auschwitz policy dictated that 10 camp inmates would be sentenced to starvation whenever prisoners went missing. When Polish army sergeant Franciszek Gajowniczek was randomly selected for this slow method of execution after an inmate disappeared, he cried out in frantic supplication that he had a wife and children. Kolbe volunteered to take this man’s place, and his offer was accepted. For two weeks, 47-year-old Kolbe led his starving prison cohort in prayer until he was at last the sole survivor of the 10. On August 14, 1941, he was executed by a lethal injection of carbolic acid to his left arm. Gajowniczek, meanwhile, died an old man in 1995, at the venerable age of 93.

Kolbe was canonized as a saint by Pope John Paul II in 1982. The pope, himself a Pole from a city near Kraków, visited Auschwitz three years prior to Kolbe’s canonization to light a candle and leave a commemorative plaque in Kolbe’s cell. John Paul II’s memorial can still be seen by visitors today, a poignant site in an otherwise dark and haunted place. John Paul II referred to Kolbe as “the patron saint of our difficult century” — an apt description for someone who faced the horrors of the Holocaust with unbreakable dignity, grace, and compassion.

In many ways the story of Kolbe’s life and death is encapsulated in the following quote, published in February of 1941, the month he was imprisoned:

“No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hecatombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”

The individual is beholden, first and foremost, to the dictates of his or her own conscience, regardless of political affiliation. One’s nationality or political party cannot determine inexorable Truth. Kolbe reminds us that internal qualities of love and humanity serve as our ultimate moral compass and are bastions of strength, even in a deeply troubled world.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau Extermination Camp

My tour group was educated about Auschwitz II-Birkenau — the major site of mass killing — while passing through the blocks of Auschwitz I. We concluded our visit to Auschwitz I by visiting a crematorium that was in use until July 1943, before the completion of the more extensive facilities at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. It served as a kind of “prototype.” 340 corpses could be burned per day at Auschwitz I after the installation of the crematorium’s three furnaces. The largest part of the crematorium, the morgue, was adapted to form an experimental gas chamber in which Zyklon B was first tested in the autumn of 1941. Again, no photography was permitted, and silence was requested out of reverence for the deceased. Standing inside the gas chamber with the knowledge of what had once occurred inside felt strange and surreal. Our guide had told us that when the Sonderkommando emptied the crematoria, the bodies of people who had tried desperately to escape during their final moments of panic were piled up against the door — yet another of those haunting details.

After our visit to Auschwitz I, the bus took us to Birkenau less than two miles away. It was late afternoon by the time we pulled up to the iconic silhouette of the building that stands at the entrance to Birkenau: a long and narrow red brick structure stretching across the horizon. A train track runs through the middle of it, beneath a segment of the building that appears to form a small tower. This was the train that brought masses of Jews, Poles, political prisoners, and other unfortunates to the gas chambers once they stepped out of the cattle cars to undergo the selection process. Anne Frank stepped onto this platform in September of 1944, having arrived on the very last train transporting Dutch Jews to death camps.

Before my day at Auschwitz, I remember reading online that another tourist had found Birkenau to be the most difficult part of her visit. Personally, I found the torture chambers and informational exhibits at Auschwitz I to be more emotionally harrowing, but I can still understand how Auschwitz II could leave visitors with a profound sense of unease. The expansive grounds of Birkenau are covered with the crumbling remnants of the gas chambers and crematoria. As I mentioned before, the Nazis destroyed evidence of their crimes when they realized the Soviet advance was inevitable, including incriminating documents.

We had a new guide at the second camp, a young Polish woman. She spoke with an air of gravitas when she informed us that the grounds at Auschwitz II should be regarded as a cemetery. After the victims were killed in the gas chambers, hair, clothing, jewelry, and gold teeth were removed by the Sonderkommando prisoners, who were tasked with transporting the corpses to the crematoria. The remaining bones that withstood cremation were ground to powder. This powder together with the ashes of the dead were driven away by truck and dumped into the Soła and Vistula rivers and local ponds. Alternatively, these remains were sometimes used as fertilizer for crops or as landfill to smooth out uneven ground or marshland. Birkenau and the land around it is thus an unofficial cemetery, the remains of the deceased integrated within the landscape itself. It is also a memorial for anyone who knows the history of the camp, visits to pay tribute to the victims, and learns from their stories.

My time walking the grounds of Birkenau seemed starkly incongruous: Atrocities like no other in history had taken place at that very spot, and my imagination could vividly conjure the masses of new and oblivious arrivals, the sorting officer’s casual death sentences with a simple movement of his hand, the Sonderkommando with their dark secrets; and beyond that, the dirt-floored barracks, the stench of foul sewage and human excrement, the misery thick in the air, and the slowly smoking chimneys of the crematoria breathing death. Snow covered the ground when the Soviets arrived in the winter of ‘44-‘45. Yet in the golden sunlight of the late afternoon on a lovely day in April, the grounds were peaceful, verdant as they were with spring grass and tiny, budding flowers. A gentle breeze wafted over the vista, a picture of tranquility. In some ways, it was comforting to think that the horror had ended and the Earth moved forward in constant motion, the sun still rising and setting over Birkenau just as it had during those terrible times.

A few weeks after my visit, I made a photobook of my trip to Poland and Western Europe to share with my boyfriend, Shawn, who joined me in my travels after Poland. The book was narrated with couplets for an added personal touch. I summarized the experience of Birkenau by writing: “A silence so loud it deafened the ear / was made by the ghosts of the souls that dwelt here.” I tried to convey the paradoxical notion that the milder and more placid a scene appears, the more unsettling it can feel if the place was marred by death and tragedy. This sentiment once again harkens back to the incongruence between past and present that defined so much of my experience at Auschwitz, imparting its surreal quality.

Our final stop was one of the surviving barracks, which was used to house Polish children who were kept for unknown reasons. The floor was paved in stone while typical barracks had dirt floors. Adult inmates had created a proper floor to make the dwelling more comfortable for its child residents. Here I saw the only artwork I encountered during the entire tour: a mural of a boy going to school with a backpack and yarmulke. I also spotted a Star of David carved into a wall. Whether it was created by a camp resident or vandalizing tourist, I couldn’t say; but the sight of it at Birkenau brought a smile to my face.

The Lessons of Auschwitz-Birkenau

Just as breathing the very air of Auschwitz into my lungs had somehow seemed like a contaminating act upon my arrival, I felt that my physical person had been similarly polluted in some intangible way after I left the complex. On the bus ride back to my hotel, I felt in dire need of a shower. I regarded the dirt on my boots with disgust. The bag of trail mix I nibbled seemed unpalatable. Once I arrived at my hotel in Luxembourg City a few days later, I paid an exorbitant price to have the dress I had worn that day dry cleaned even though it wasn’t dirty and didn’t smell. It was as though I needed to remove the essence of Auschwitz from me and all things mine.

Auschwitz left a strong impression on me, and for days my mind was busy attempting to unravel what I had seen and experienced in Poland. Everyone else on my tour had gone with a companion, but since I had made the journey as a lone traveler, there was no one to talk to who could directly identify with what I was feeling. Writing down my impressions and sharing them with Shawn, however, did help me to come to terms with the thoughts swirling around in my head. Even so, when I had coffee in Amsterdam with a friend from London shortly after my tour, memories of the camp still weighed heavily on my consciousness. We also visited the Anne Frank house. Throughout our time together, I felt the need to purge my mind of this weight I was carrying by reflecting on my experience at Auschwitz with my friend’s listening ear.

I’ve heard it said that when one person dies, it’s a tragedy, but when 1 million people die, it’s a statistic (a sentiment attributed, of all people, to Joseph Stalin). When, over coffee with my friend, I disclosed the details that had made the Holocaust come to life for me, the facts of Auschwitz were transformed from impersonal history to a personal tragedy I could grieve collectively with others. For me, millions of people were no longer simply statistics.

At the far end of Birkenau, at the Judenrampe — where human remains were unceremoniously deposited — lies a memorial built in 1967 consisting of a long row of engraved stone plaques lying flat on the ground. The same message is written on each of the 21 stones in the native tongue of each and every victim of Auschwitz. An English memorial plaque was later added due to the influx of English-speaking tourists. The message of the memorial is this:

“For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children, mainly Jews from various countries of Europe. Auschwitz-Birkenau 1940-1945”

What happened in Europe during the Holocaust is a tragedy; but it is also a tragedy not to remember it, learn about it, and grow from it as people of the 21st century who have the privilege of hindsight. The events of the Holocaust inspired a plethora of psychological studies on human behavior examining the nature of evil and the abuse of power; people could hardly comprehend such transgressions against humanity. Unfortunately when dealing with groups of people with rigid, passionately-defined identities, those who are different — “they,” “them” and the “others” — are sometimes subjected to principles of exclusion that sew prejudice and discord.

For those of us who aren’t researchers of social psychology, visiting Nazi concentration camps is another way of respecting the dead and making their deaths count for something. The experience isn’t just edifying for people with extremist political beliefs, but potentially for anyone: Extermination camps warn us not to fear the “other” — whether that “otherness” be determined by race, religion, culture, sexual identity, or something else — just because they are different from us and to exercise caution when assigning blame to groups of people. They teach us to guard against complacency and passivity and to strive to hold ourselves to higher standards of personal integrity. As Kolbe reminds us, “[t]he most deadly poison […] is indifference.” Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel famously echoed this sentiment in a 1986 interview by stating, “Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.” An atrocity committed against any group of marginalized people should be taken personally as a crime against broader humanity. Even something as glaringly macroscopic as genocide begins in the minds of individuals who turn a blind eye to smaller but more insidious infractions of common decency, people who believe lies by constructing narratives of reality more comforting to them than the truth.

More egalitarian modes of thinking — that is, taking acts of social injustice against others seriously — encourages solidarity in a nation or community rather than petty tribalism. Greater awareness offers hope for change, and so does love. Even after witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust, Viktor Frankl ultimately saw “the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers […] that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire […] The salvation of man is through love and in love.” It is of consolation that someone who survived Auschwitz, the place that murdered God for the teenaged Wiesel, still maintained the primacy of love.

Concluding Thoughts

As I hope to have imparted, many, many lessons can be learned from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz can, in fact, be defined in terms of the lessons it teaches us. Auschwitz is what can happen when people make decisions based on emotions rather than facts; when fear becomes a primary impetus for political action; when entire groups are blamed, stereotyped, and dehumanized; when loyalty is valued above integrity; and when people believe what is convenient over what is true and do what is easy rather than what is right. In Kolbe’s spiritual language, it is people defying Truth by giving evil the upper hand over good and allowing sin to triumph over love.

However, visiting a Nazi concentration camp — or even just learning about it through the accounts of survivors, historians, and others who have information to share — breeds a kind of sensitivity that imparts valuable insight into human behavior. This knowledge becomes an antidote to the forces of fascism, xenophobia, and intellectual darkness that created the Holocaust; here, the opposite of ignorance is acceptance and the opposite of hate is knowledge. If we aspire to take something positive and universal from places like Auschwitz, let it be tolerance and the resolve to create a better and more compassionate world than the one in which its prisoners suffered.