Auschwitz

‘Arbeit macht frei’. ‘Work makes you free’.

This slogan written on top of the gates gave false hope to all who entered these gates. Our tour guide told us that once the Jews entered these gates they would ask about how to gain freedom and a guard was famous for saying that the only way they would see freedom would be through a chimney stack!!! How horrendous!

Today was a very sad and difficult day! The idea that human beings could do this much harm to innocent people is hard to comprehend!!! You can study it and read about it, but coming here and experiencing it firsthand is another reality all together!

It was a gloomy, cold, and rainy day.

Driving towards Auschwitz I could see the train line from the bus window. It was unreal to think it was that track, right beside me, that had taken all those those people to their death. They knew nothing of the hell they where about to suffer, the experimentation and starvation they would have to endure before their life ended.

The majority of the people on the train were Jews. They thought they where headed to a new and improved life.

many had packed all their treasured belongings because they thought they were being relocated. Over a million people never made it out alive.

Death was the only way to escape the atrocities of camp life.

Walking around Auschwitz had a surreal feel. It was untouched and seemed like a ghost town: you could almost imagine the prisoners walking beside you in their bare feet and rags for clothes.

It was so cold and unsheltered, to try and imagine what it was like for them was impossible. It is incredible to me that anyone could have suffered such an experience.

Block 11 in Auschwitz is one of the most disturbing and evil places on this earth. You can’t and don’t want to begin to think of the types of experimentation that went on in that building. It is unfathomable. The torture chambers and standing cells seem so far from humanity it is hard to believe any survived. That kind of willpower shows the strength and courage of these people, which should be commended forever and never forgotten.

Seeing rooms filled with the prisoners’ possessions was an extremely difficult thing to do: suitcases with names and addresses, shoes and glasses. The worst was seeing all the hair. It was from the prisoners who had died after being in the gas chambers and it had been shaven after death and kept to make carpets. The gas had stripped the hair of color leaving you to imagine what it must have done to the people themselves, the immense pain they must have felt before their death.