A morning at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.

A van comes to pick me up at 05h55. I’m surprised it’s such a small group until we are stop before a larger bus. This is the one that will take us to the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum and memorial.

The bus plays a film about the concentration camps as we drive out of the city into the countryside. I’m surprised at how beautiful the landscape is, the small towns and villages and farmland. It seems impossible that such horrific acts and such evil could have been visited here.

It’s slightly raining when we arrive. The parking lot is dominated by tour buses and large groups of people are milling about before the entrance. Our guide tells us that we have a few minutes before our entry time and points out the bathrooms. He tells us to meet him again where we are in fifteen minutes.

At the appointed time we gather before our guide. He hands us our tickets and leads us to the entrance, where we meet our local guide.

The new visitor center and entrance was opened in 2023. It was designed by Kozień Architekci, who won the 2010 competition. Then, the jury wrote:

The entire composition and the proposed character of its architecture produces the mood of quiet and focus necessary in a museum complex with such specificity.

The architects themselves wrote of their work:

The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp as a place is a monument, a sign. A silence zone. The spatial composition of the service and entrance area should listen attentively to the sound of silence. At a loss for words.

It’s a sobering entrance, walking underground past the stark concrete walls. At the end a slow sloping ramp brings us up into a grassy courtyard and the beginning of our tour.

Our guide’s name is Sylvia. She’s from Oświęcim; Auschwitz is the Germanization of the Polish name. People forget that before the horrors of World War II these were towns like any other. She tells me her parents were sent there during the Communist era, met, and had her.

We walk past barracks on the path that leads to the main gate of the concentration camp. Above, the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” are wrought in iron. Work will set you free. For most, freedom came only through death.

We walk towards the buildings in which people were housed, now turned into galleries and exhibition spaces. Inside, they are austere, not hiding their previous use but not advertising it either. In the first building Sylvia leads us into is the Ashes Memorial, an urn containing the ashes of victims who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It’s dedicated to the memory of all Holocaust victims of World War II.

Sylvia continues to dole out the history of the concentration camps and the atrocities that were committed within. Maps trace the places from which victims were deported. Photos document their arrival. One display contains empty cannisters of Zyklon B, the cyanide-based pesticide used in the gas chambers. She tells of how experiments were conducted to determine dosage, the suffering in the early stages when the dose was not enough.

We follow Sylvia quietly, the loudest sound the crunch underfoot as we walk from one building to the next. Conversations are hushed, speaking only as necessary.

One building exhibits items left behind by the victims: Prosthetics. Shoes. Rooms and rooms of shoes. And hair. We’re asked not to take photos of the hair out of respect for those lost. The last room contains piles of luggage, many with names written upon them by people who would never again be reunited with what they’d brought, who would lose that and more.

One building exhibits rows and rows of portraits of victims. Sylvia points out one portrait on a wall. In the next room she points out a photo of the woman’s child. Lost.

We walk to a building at the end of the block. In the courtyard between Block 10 and Block 11 stands the “Wall of Death.” Block 11 was used for penal purposes and housed prisoners awaiting execution. The Death wall was where they were executed by firing squad.

We walk back past the blocks down a path that leads us towards another part of the camp. We pass through walls of barbed wire and through a gate to reach a building that was a prototype of the gas chambers and crematoriums built at Birkenau.

Sylvia leads us into an underground chamber that served as one of the shower prototypes, describing how cannisters would be unloaded from above. In the next room there’s a small crematorium. Not enough to dispose of all the bodies. The Nazis would expand their operations at Birkenau, having completed tests here.

We walk back towards the entrance. Sylvia points the way out. She tells us she’ll rejoin us at Birkenau and turns to follow another path.

We board the bus and drive to Birkenau, which is where the gas chambers were built and where murder was conducted on a mass scale.

We meet Sylvia at the entrance to Birkenau. A light rain has begun to fall and we walk the long path towards the gas chambers towards the back of the camp.

I ask Sylvia how long she’s been a guide. Fifteen years, she tells me. I ask her how she became interested. She laughs. We’re about to reach the ruins of the gas chambers. She tells me to ask her again when we’re on our way back.

When the Germans lost the war they bombed the gas chambers to try and hide what they did. We stand before the ruins. Sylvia reminds us that there was nothing spontaneous about what happened here; it was meticulously planned and executed.

Sylvia tells me becoming a guide was not her intention. She studied politics at university, but didn’t want to go into it after she graduated.

When she was abroad people would ask where she was from. They’d be surprised when she would tell them Oświęcim, thinking that it was only the name and place of death camps. She came back to Poland and to Oświęcim to educate people.

I ask her what her family does. Her sister works in administration at a museum. Her parents are still working: one a builder, the other in insurance.

I ask Sylvia what keeps her going 15 years on. She tells me maybe she’s naïve but she hopes that people will take something away with them. She hopes people will learn from history. I tell her the lessons of history seem lost in the States. She says it’s not just the States. 🇵🇱