Poland (Part 2 of 2)
Continued from here; same warnings apply.
Day 3 cont.: Birkenau concentration camp.
My camera battery ran low when we got to Birkenau (Auschwitz II) in the afternoon, so I don't have many pictures and have borrowed some from a couple of others who went on the trip who've posted their photos already.
Built adjacent to Auschwitz to take care of the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews shipped in, Birkenau was my "favorite" of the four camps we visited. It hit me hardest, unquestionably. It was vast, desolate, familiar and powerful. Familiar because most of the book-length testimonies I've read have been from inmates of Birkenau, so many of the sites came alive with the stories I knew; powerful because of its size and imposing, chilling front gate, which the train tracks ran straight through and continued for what must've been a mile until they stopped at one of the camp's many gas chambers in the back. What made six million feel largest to me was to stand on those tracks and look at the grass stretching so far in either direction and imagine the number of people who could fit there-and that was just one train's worth.
Walking up to Birkenau.
The front gate.
Less than halfway down the tracks into the camp.
Another girl's photo, further down.
Path running beside the tracks with the first row of bunks visible.
Inside the women's bunk. Something like 1,000 people were crammed into each building.
Most of the gas chambers and crematoria have collapsed or were destroyed by the Germans as they fled the oncoming Russian/Allied army.
I was excited to see the chamber that was blown up by the Sonderkommando in one of the Nazi camps' only (successful) organized protests during the war. Usually the prisoners were too weak, separated, threatened and powerless to carry out anything like the explosion of a crematorium.
One of the "killing fields" present at many camps, where thousands of bodies were laid out and burned. Sometimes the Germans had to dig up-or forced prisoners to dig up-the buried bodies of people who'd already been killed and then burn them to get rid of the evidence. Except then the Russian army found graves filled with tons of ashes. This was something we saw at Majdanek the next day. In the front are the only three photographs known to have been taken by prisoners in the camp. They were smuggled out to try to convince people that the rumors they were hearing about what was going on in these camps were true.
(From a different participant:) Inside an exhibit at the back of the camp where prisoners were decontaminated (the "Sauna"), a wall of photos taken from people who were gassed. Another method of personalizing the victims.
View from the Sauna to a guardhouse at the back of the camp. This must have been what people saw as their heads were shaved and their clothes taken.
On the way out of the camp, we walked down this path with barbed wire on both sides. To try to give you some sense of how big this camp was, this view is crosswise across the camp and ends at the tracks in the middle. It must have taken us 20 or 30 minutes to walk from the far corner to the front gate.
Then we drove back to Warsaw. Our second of many very long, hard days.
To lighten the mood: This was the billboard we saw from our hotel room that night in Warsaw.
Another girl has a clearer view of it.
Day 4: Majdanek camp.
People had warned me that Majdanek ("My-DAH-nik") would be the most distressing camp because it is the most preserved. I found Birkenau to be the most moving, but Majdanek disturbed in its own ways. For one thing, it was built next to a city, and today there are houses right up against the edge of the camp. The Polish people had their own problems when the Nazis took over their country, but it's difficult to think about how people could live so near a death camp. Even the day we went, there were a father and son riding their bikes through the camp to get to wherever they were going, eating ice cream.
Walking up to Majdanek.
Rows of preserved wooden barracks and the ubiquitous barbed wire. Throughout the camp today are red fire extinguisher stations because everything is so flammable.
There were different versions of gas chambers in the camp that showed how the Germans were experimenting with different methods of killing. There were showerheads and wooden vents for carbon monoxide and Zyklon B.
A memorial for fallen Jews build by inmates of the camp during their internment. It's said to be the first memorial of its kind. In the base are some ashes. The design at the top had to be approved by the German overseers and so it was modeled after the Nazi eagle, but it was sculpted to look more like the Polish eagle.
View of the camp and city behind it from the far side, approaching the crematorium, burning-fields and memorial.
Front, back and outside of the crematorium. The back was dirty. I don't think I want to know whether the filth was years of dust or something else.
Inside was an autopsy room where the staff would search bodies for valuables.
Also inside was another, modern memorial, with each stand representing a community that was sent to the camp, with the names written in their native languages.
In what may have been the most mind-bending statistic of our visit, this memorial beside an innocuous-looking field read that 42,000 Jews from Majdanek and Lublin were executed here in 24 hours. 42,000 people in 24 hours.
There's a big memorial in the back of the camp that reads, "Let our fate be a warning to you." Inside are the ashes of some of the prisoners that were unearthed by the Russians.
It looked like dirt and rocks. Only when I saw this photo from another participant did I discover that you could see bone fragments in there.
People cried a lot at Majdanek. They'd cried at the small memorial ceremony our group held at the end of our visit to Auschwitz, and they'd cried at various places in Birkenau, but more people cried, and cried hardest, at Majdanek. My guess is that it was a combination of having visited three camps in two days, the preservation of this particular camp, and the emotional testimonials we read beside the last memorial. That, and seeing people cry triggers other people.
One girl really lost it because she'd found out with the help of our guide the day before that her great-grandmother and great-aunt had been sent to Chelmno and killed in gas vans. One of the testimonies our guide read at the first memorial in Majdanek was from one German officer to another regarding the daily functioning of the vans (e.g. "doesn't work when it rains"), and she had to leave the group.
(I cried once, a little, not at a camp but at our group "sharing session" later that night. Hearing other people talk through tears does me in.)
After the camp we went to an orthodox synagogue near our hotel to attend a Polish Shabbat service. We were mostly girls and all had to sit on the upper level and watch the men do their thing. In one way, it was interesting to see how similar Jewish traditions are from one country to another. In another way, the whole thing was alien. I'm not orthodox, for one thing, so the whole separation of the sexes and the amount of Hebrew during the service and the individual praying was not my typical experience. Some of the melodies were different, too. It was fun, though, when all the guys were encouraged to join in a dance around the Torah, even if the dance was more of a shuffle.
Day 4 (Saturday/Shabbat): Walking tour of Warsaw..
People were really feeling depressed by then and hating Poland, and a couple of people were getting sick, so it must have come as a relief to have Saturday off for Shabbat. Well, "off" in the sense that we didn't see any camps, but after sleeping in a little we were still up and out and walking around for the rest of the day.
We started out across the street from the hotel at the tower that everyone in the city hates because it was a gift from Stalin. This is the bottom.
Nearby, as in Krakow, there was a courtyard with some surviving buildings from the ghetto. Again, poor people still live in those decrepit homes. The Jewish Quarters in Polish cities tended not to be in pretty areas. Then again, most of Warsaw was rubble by the end of the war, so what's there now might not be representative of what was there then.
At the end of the street was an exhibition where they'd hung portraits of Jewish citizens from the 19th or early 20th centuries.
We continued after a family-style lunch at the kosher restaurant in Warsaw where we ate every meal. Here is our guide, Chaim, holding up a picture of a synagogue that used to be where we were sitting, in a modern bank. He did that a lot during our stay in Warsaw, and it was really interesting to see what had stayed the same and what had been built over in the last 60 years.
Walking down what was once the biggest, thriving shopping street for Jews in Warsaw. All that's there now are the tram tracks and a sewer grate where children would smuggle food into the ghetto and hide with weapons during the uprising.
The Supreme Court, with a sculpture in front of the Polish uprising, inspired by the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
Past the court we reached Warsaw's Old City, also boasting a Barbican. It was a beautiful part of town, very European-looking.
The main square. Not the biggest platz in Europe, but it did have this horse and buggy, Marie Curie's house/museum and many outdoor cafés. Also delicious, thick ice cream of a sort I'd never had before and sadly forgot the name of, other than it started with "S."
We had our first free time of the trip in the market square. The rest of the time, we had to be with the group from morning to night and weren't allowed to leave the hotel in between. This lack of independence grated on some people, especially the older ones. But really, it was clear from the time we signed the trip contract that we were not allowed to wander off on our own.
Some of us opted to start our free time with a visit to the Marie Curie Museum. Unfortunately, it had just closed when we got there.
We strolled around the square instead and had a nice time. Then it rained on us, and we (the entire group) walked back past the President's house and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, through a park and high-end shopping street, and back to the restaurant for dinner.
Day 6: Warsaw, Treblinka, airport.
Sunday morning we loaded all our stuff onto the bus and headed for a few last sites in Warsaw. First up was the Umschlagplatz, where Jews from the ghetto were deported by train to Treblinka.
Next up was Pawiak, a former political prison that took in Jewish inmates as well during the war. Inside (where you weren't allowed to take pictures) you could see the original tiny cells with their iron doors, exhibits with instruments of torture like braided steel whips, and signs showing how the German prisoners were allotted 100% meat rations while Jews, at the bottom rung, were given 0%.
Our last stop (other than a shopping mall for lunch) was the Jewish cemetery, which, more than anything else, drove home how vibrant the community was before the war, judging by how crowded the grounds were and how ostentatious some of the monuments were. P.S. We saw a headstone for someone called Frankenstein.
This was an entrance into the sewers I mentioned before. Many of the kids who worked the sewers would hide out in the cemetery when they needed to, because the German soldiers were wary of coming inside.
And then we drove to Treblinka II, our fourth and final camp visit. Treblinka II was an extermination camp rather than a labor camp, so there were never any barracks here, only killing machinery. The whole thing was destroyed at the end of the war, and there's nothing left now but clearings with memorials. If it weren't for a few witness accounts, people might never have known about what happened there. As our guide said, it makes you wonder whether there are still undiscovered mass graves out there in the countryside.
The memorial leading up to the main field was designed to look like giant train tracks.
You could see the path of the tracks better as you headed back afterwards.
The main memorials at Treblinka were fields of stones, each one representing a village, town or city whose Jews were exterminated at Treblinka.
There were a lot of stones.
Some people got teary at Treblinka too (although most of them were emotionally and physically worn out and complaining about having to visit another camp). This time it turned out that one of the girls' grandfather had escaped being killed there by hiding with a non-Jewish Polish family with his two brothers, one of whom made it out of the country with him. The other brother wasn't so lucky. Her grandfather had written a book about it, and our trip leader, who'd skimmed it on the plane and bus, told us about it while we stood by the stone representing the grandfather's town.
And then we drove to the airport and flew to Israel, where people stopped being depressed and started having fun. Israel was fun, and it was beautiful, but I enjoyed myself in Poland as well, if that's the right word for it. While I didn't feel very much while I was there, which was uncomfortable when we had our "sharing sessions," I was fascinated by the camps, seeing in person what I'd learned about, and grateful to have been able to visit them. Like our guide or team leader said at some point, visiting the camps made us in some way witnesses to the Holocaust, an especially important point now that the last survivors are nearing the ends of their lives. I chose this trip from among all the Taglit-Birthright options because I wanted to see the camps, so at this point I was satisfied and Israel was like a tacked-on bonus.
Which we will talk about another night...
ETA: here.
Day 3 cont.: Birkenau concentration camp.
My camera battery ran low when we got to Birkenau (Auschwitz II) in the afternoon, so I don't have many pictures and have borrowed some from a couple of others who went on the trip who've posted their photos already.
Built adjacent to Auschwitz to take care of the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews shipped in, Birkenau was my "favorite" of the four camps we visited. It hit me hardest, unquestionably. It was vast, desolate, familiar and powerful. Familiar because most of the book-length testimonies I've read have been from inmates of Birkenau, so many of the sites came alive with the stories I knew; powerful because of its size and imposing, chilling front gate, which the train tracks ran straight through and continued for what must've been a mile until they stopped at one of the camp's many gas chambers in the back. What made six million feel largest to me was to stand on those tracks and look at the grass stretching so far in either direction and imagine the number of people who could fit there-and that was just one train's worth.
Walking up to Birkenau.
The front gate.
Less than halfway down the tracks into the camp.
Another girl's photo, further down.
Path running beside the tracks with the first row of bunks visible.
Inside the women's bunk. Something like 1,000 people were crammed into each building.
Most of the gas chambers and crematoria have collapsed or were destroyed by the Germans as they fled the oncoming Russian/Allied army.
I was excited to see the chamber that was blown up by the Sonderkommando in one of the Nazi camps' only (successful) organized protests during the war. Usually the prisoners were too weak, separated, threatened and powerless to carry out anything like the explosion of a crematorium.
One of the "killing fields" present at many camps, where thousands of bodies were laid out and burned. Sometimes the Germans had to dig up-or forced prisoners to dig up-the buried bodies of people who'd already been killed and then burn them to get rid of the evidence. Except then the Russian army found graves filled with tons of ashes. This was something we saw at Majdanek the next day. In the front are the only three photographs known to have been taken by prisoners in the camp. They were smuggled out to try to convince people that the rumors they were hearing about what was going on in these camps were true.
(From a different participant:) Inside an exhibit at the back of the camp where prisoners were decontaminated (the "Sauna"), a wall of photos taken from people who were gassed. Another method of personalizing the victims.
View from the Sauna to a guardhouse at the back of the camp. This must have been what people saw as their heads were shaved and their clothes taken.
On the way out of the camp, we walked down this path with barbed wire on both sides. To try to give you some sense of how big this camp was, this view is crosswise across the camp and ends at the tracks in the middle. It must have taken us 20 or 30 minutes to walk from the far corner to the front gate.
Then we drove back to Warsaw. Our second of many very long, hard days.
To lighten the mood: This was the billboard we saw from our hotel room that night in Warsaw.
Another girl has a clearer view of it.
Day 4: Majdanek camp.
People had warned me that Majdanek ("My-DAH-nik") would be the most distressing camp because it is the most preserved. I found Birkenau to be the most moving, but Majdanek disturbed in its own ways. For one thing, it was built next to a city, and today there are houses right up against the edge of the camp. The Polish people had their own problems when the Nazis took over their country, but it's difficult to think about how people could live so near a death camp. Even the day we went, there were a father and son riding their bikes through the camp to get to wherever they were going, eating ice cream.
Walking up to Majdanek.
Rows of preserved wooden barracks and the ubiquitous barbed wire. Throughout the camp today are red fire extinguisher stations because everything is so flammable.
There were different versions of gas chambers in the camp that showed how the Germans were experimenting with different methods of killing. There were showerheads and wooden vents for carbon monoxide and Zyklon B.
A memorial for fallen Jews build by inmates of the camp during their internment. It's said to be the first memorial of its kind. In the base are some ashes. The design at the top had to be approved by the German overseers and so it was modeled after the Nazi eagle, but it was sculpted to look more like the Polish eagle.
View of the camp and city behind it from the far side, approaching the crematorium, burning-fields and memorial.
Front, back and outside of the crematorium. The back was dirty. I don't think I want to know whether the filth was years of dust or something else.
Inside was an autopsy room where the staff would search bodies for valuables.
Also inside was another, modern memorial, with each stand representing a community that was sent to the camp, with the names written in their native languages.
In what may have been the most mind-bending statistic of our visit, this memorial beside an innocuous-looking field read that 42,000 Jews from Majdanek and Lublin were executed here in 24 hours. 42,000 people in 24 hours.
There's a big memorial in the back of the camp that reads, "Let our fate be a warning to you." Inside are the ashes of some of the prisoners that were unearthed by the Russians.
It looked like dirt and rocks. Only when I saw this photo from another participant did I discover that you could see bone fragments in there.
People cried a lot at Majdanek. They'd cried at the small memorial ceremony our group held at the end of our visit to Auschwitz, and they'd cried at various places in Birkenau, but more people cried, and cried hardest, at Majdanek. My guess is that it was a combination of having visited three camps in two days, the preservation of this particular camp, and the emotional testimonials we read beside the last memorial. That, and seeing people cry triggers other people.
One girl really lost it because she'd found out with the help of our guide the day before that her great-grandmother and great-aunt had been sent to Chelmno and killed in gas vans. One of the testimonies our guide read at the first memorial in Majdanek was from one German officer to another regarding the daily functioning of the vans (e.g. "doesn't work when it rains"), and she had to leave the group.
(I cried once, a little, not at a camp but at our group "sharing session" later that night. Hearing other people talk through tears does me in.)
After the camp we went to an orthodox synagogue near our hotel to attend a Polish Shabbat service. We were mostly girls and all had to sit on the upper level and watch the men do their thing. In one way, it was interesting to see how similar Jewish traditions are from one country to another. In another way, the whole thing was alien. I'm not orthodox, for one thing, so the whole separation of the sexes and the amount of Hebrew during the service and the individual praying was not my typical experience. Some of the melodies were different, too. It was fun, though, when all the guys were encouraged to join in a dance around the Torah, even if the dance was more of a shuffle.
Day 4 (Saturday/Shabbat): Walking tour of Warsaw..
People were really feeling depressed by then and hating Poland, and a couple of people were getting sick, so it must have come as a relief to have Saturday off for Shabbat. Well, "off" in the sense that we didn't see any camps, but after sleeping in a little we were still up and out and walking around for the rest of the day.
We started out across the street from the hotel at the tower that everyone in the city hates because it was a gift from Stalin. This is the bottom.
Nearby, as in Krakow, there was a courtyard with some surviving buildings from the ghetto. Again, poor people still live in those decrepit homes. The Jewish Quarters in Polish cities tended not to be in pretty areas. Then again, most of Warsaw was rubble by the end of the war, so what's there now might not be representative of what was there then.
At the end of the street was an exhibition where they'd hung portraits of Jewish citizens from the 19th or early 20th centuries.
We continued after a family-style lunch at the kosher restaurant in Warsaw where we ate every meal. Here is our guide, Chaim, holding up a picture of a synagogue that used to be where we were sitting, in a modern bank. He did that a lot during our stay in Warsaw, and it was really interesting to see what had stayed the same and what had been built over in the last 60 years.
Walking down what was once the biggest, thriving shopping street for Jews in Warsaw. All that's there now are the tram tracks and a sewer grate where children would smuggle food into the ghetto and hide with weapons during the uprising.
The Supreme Court, with a sculpture in front of the Polish uprising, inspired by the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
Past the court we reached Warsaw's Old City, also boasting a Barbican. It was a beautiful part of town, very European-looking.
The main square. Not the biggest platz in Europe, but it did have this horse and buggy, Marie Curie's house/museum and many outdoor cafés. Also delicious, thick ice cream of a sort I'd never had before and sadly forgot the name of, other than it started with "S."
We had our first free time of the trip in the market square. The rest of the time, we had to be with the group from morning to night and weren't allowed to leave the hotel in between. This lack of independence grated on some people, especially the older ones. But really, it was clear from the time we signed the trip contract that we were not allowed to wander off on our own.
Some of us opted to start our free time with a visit to the Marie Curie Museum. Unfortunately, it had just closed when we got there.
We strolled around the square instead and had a nice time. Then it rained on us, and we (the entire group) walked back past the President's house and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, through a park and high-end shopping street, and back to the restaurant for dinner.
Day 6: Warsaw, Treblinka, airport.
Sunday morning we loaded all our stuff onto the bus and headed for a few last sites in Warsaw. First up was the Umschlagplatz, where Jews from the ghetto were deported by train to Treblinka.
Next up was Pawiak, a former political prison that took in Jewish inmates as well during the war. Inside (where you weren't allowed to take pictures) you could see the original tiny cells with their iron doors, exhibits with instruments of torture like braided steel whips, and signs showing how the German prisoners were allotted 100% meat rations while Jews, at the bottom rung, were given 0%.
Our last stop (other than a shopping mall for lunch) was the Jewish cemetery, which, more than anything else, drove home how vibrant the community was before the war, judging by how crowded the grounds were and how ostentatious some of the monuments were. P.S. We saw a headstone for someone called Frankenstein.
This was an entrance into the sewers I mentioned before. Many of the kids who worked the sewers would hide out in the cemetery when they needed to, because the German soldiers were wary of coming inside.
And then we drove to Treblinka II, our fourth and final camp visit. Treblinka II was an extermination camp rather than a labor camp, so there were never any barracks here, only killing machinery. The whole thing was destroyed at the end of the war, and there's nothing left now but clearings with memorials. If it weren't for a few witness accounts, people might never have known about what happened there. As our guide said, it makes you wonder whether there are still undiscovered mass graves out there in the countryside.
The memorial leading up to the main field was designed to look like giant train tracks.
You could see the path of the tracks better as you headed back afterwards.
The main memorials at Treblinka were fields of stones, each one representing a village, town or city whose Jews were exterminated at Treblinka.
There were a lot of stones.
Some people got teary at Treblinka too (although most of them were emotionally and physically worn out and complaining about having to visit another camp). This time it turned out that one of the girls' grandfather had escaped being killed there by hiding with a non-Jewish Polish family with his two brothers, one of whom made it out of the country with him. The other brother wasn't so lucky. Her grandfather had written a book about it, and our trip leader, who'd skimmed it on the plane and bus, told us about it while we stood by the stone representing the grandfather's town.
And then we drove to the airport and flew to Israel, where people stopped being depressed and started having fun. Israel was fun, and it was beautiful, but I enjoyed myself in Poland as well, if that's the right word for it. While I didn't feel very much while I was there, which was uncomfortable when we had our "sharing sessions," I was fascinated by the camps, seeing in person what I'd learned about, and grateful to have been able to visit them. Like our guide or team leader said at some point, visiting the camps made us in some way witnesses to the Holocaust, an especially important point now that the last survivors are nearing the ends of their lives. I chose this trip from among all the Taglit-Birthright options because I wanted to see the camps, so at this point I was satisfied and Israel was like a tacked-on bonus.
Which we will talk about another night...
ETA: here.