Auschwitz-Birkenau was located in a swampy area of Poland outside of Oshwiecim.  The SS chose the location of Auschwitz because it was a good spot for transportation.  Auschwitz had an area of forty square kilometers and it was very prohibited.  The perimeter was all lined in electric, barbed fences.  Above the entrance gate of Auschwitz, “Arbeit macht frei” was written, that means, “Work liberates”.  Auschwitz was established on May 27, 1940.  Later on, Auschwitz was split into three major camps and more than forty smaller camps.  The three major camps were Auschwitz I or “Stammlager” (original camp), Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Auschwitz III-Monowitz.

The barracks of Auschwitz in the winter of 1941.

 

The prisoners taken to Auschwitz traveled there in cattle cars.  “One day cattle cars arrived.  We didn’t know what was happening to us.  That’s for sure.  My family and I were in the first group taken from the ghetto.” –From survivor Judy Schonfeld Schables.

 

This is a map of where the Auschwitz camps were.

 

On June 14, 1940, the first prisoners were brought to Auschwitz.  They were Polish political prisoners.  Gypsies and deportees of different nations were brought next.  The Germans and the Polish were mainly taken to Auschwitz I, not that many Jewish prisoners were taken were taken to Auschwitz.  But in October 1941, Auschwitz I was added on to by a much larger structure of wooden barracks named Auschwitz II or Birkenau, because the Nazis began wanting to wipe out the entire Jewish population.  In order to do that, they had to enlarge the camp to fit 30,000 prisoners.  

 

When the prisoners got to Auschwitz, sadly, only about one fourth of them were selected to stay alive and work for the Nazis.  The old, unhealthy, and children had to go strait to the gas chambers. 

 

“The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again.”

                                                                                     -George Santayana

 

Mendy Berger remembered the road to Auschwitz: “One hundred people standing in a locked railroad car no food, no water, people dying, the smell of the dead, and we had no toilets.  We did it right where we were standing, and we couldn’t move away from it.”

 

Every prisoner at Auschwitz was tattooed, beginning on the left upper chest, but then they began marking the prisoners’ left arm.  There were about 261,000 registered camp inmates who lost their lives at Auschwitz.  134,000 prisoners either transferred to a different camp or were evacuated and thousands of these died in the horrible death marches.

 

In March 1942, Auschwitz I created a department for women prisoners.  They made it by separating the men’s camp with a wall of bricks that was two meters high.  The first inmates of the camp were 999 prisoners from the Ravensbruck camp.  The women’s camp only lasted about five months, on August 6, 1942; the women’s camp’s prisoners were taken to Birkenau.  The first mass extermination of female prisoners was going on while they were being transferred.  Four thousand of the twelve thousand female prisoners were gassed in Auschwitz I.

 

This was found in a guest book: “Tears pour fourth with every new image, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my life is forever changed.  My words just graze the surface of overwhelming compassion and sorrow I feel towards each and every holocaust victim.” 

The corps of victim of Auschwitz.

 

The conditions Jews had to put up with were disgusting, horrible, and un fair.  Sometimes, six to eight prisoners had to share one plank-bed.  Also, seven hundred to one thousand inmates shared only ten toilets.  The SS developed a huge extermination complex at Birkenau, which supposedly had a Badenslaten (bathing arrangements) after March 1942.  These showers didn’t have water coming out; gas came out of the showerheads instead of water.

 

Near the town of Brzezinka, was Germany’s biggest concentration and extermination camp.  This Camp was Auschwitz/Birkenau.  Originally, the structure of Birkenau was made to hold fifty-two horses.  Instead of horses, though, Birkeanu held about eight hundred women, men, and children.  At first, Birkenau was a home for the Russian prisoners of war.  Most of them died because of the camp’s unhealthy conditions.

 

The supreme commandant of Auschwitz and all of its sub-camps was Rudolf Franz Höss from May 4, 1940 until early in January of 1945.  Höss was also captain in the SS, or “SS-Hauptsturmfurer”.

 

The SS took everything from the Jews that had any value.  They took gold (found in the Jews’ jewelry and in their dental work), hair, and shoes.  The SS used the shoes for their leather to make the German army’s uniforms.  These are just some examples.

 

 All of the prisoners from different groups wore different clothes.  Jews had to wear a yellow star.  Other signs were used to separate other groups, such as: gypsies and political prisoners

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These are Auschwitz’s victims’ glasses.

 

On July 17, 1942 the first Jews from Auschwitz were sent to Doctor Josef Menegle.  The Jews were used pretty much as lab-rats.  Josef Mengele performed experiments oh them, such as: killing twins to do autopsies on them just to improve the Aryan race.

 

Near the town of Dwory, there was another Auschwitz camp. This camp was Auschwitz III.  Auschwitz III was established in May 1942.  It was used as a slave-labor camp.

 

This is to give you a little bit of an idea of what it was like to be running from the Nazis: on April 7, 1944, two young Jews got away from Auschwitz and traveled to the Jewish underground in Slovakia.  They said that if you escaped what happened was: “If at the roll call any prisoner is found missing, an alarm is sounded… Hundreds of SS men with bloodhounds search the area between the two fences.  The sirens alert the whole region so that even after miraculously breaking through the two guarded fences, the danger of falling into the hands of the SS patrols.” The two Jews who escaped said, “During our two years of imprisonment, many attempted to escape, but with the exception of two or three, all were brought back dead or alive.”

 

 

Stacie Cook

7th Social Studies

Rossville Jr. High

Holocaust Project

Spring 2003

 

                                                                                                        

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