To understand what connects seemingly incompatible words like museum, concentration camps, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Auschwitz, you need to understand one of the most terrible and tragic stages in the history of mankind.
Auschwitz is a complex of concentration camps that was located during the war in the area of the city of Auschwitz. Poland lost this city in 1939, when at the beginning of hostilities it was annexed to German territory and received the name Auschwitz.
Birkenau is the second German death camp, located in the village of Brzezinka, where more than a million people were tortured.
In 1946, the Polish authorities decided to organize an open-air museum on the territory of Auschwitz, and in 1947 it was opened. The museum itself is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. The Auschwitz Museum is visited by about two million people a year.
First Auschwitz
The Auschwitz concentration camp was located on the southern side of Poland, forty-five kilometers from the city of Krakow. It was the largest death camp for the mass murder of people. From 1940 to 1945, 1 million 100 thousand people died here, among whom 90% were people of Jewish nationality. Auschwitz has become synonymous with genocide, brutality,misanthropy.
Becoming Chancellor of Germany, A. Hitler promised to return the German people to their former power, and at the same time to deal with a dangerous racial enemy - the Jews. In 1939, units of the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. More than 3 million Jews found themselves in the territory controlled by the German army.
In 1940, the first concentration camp for political prisoners Auschwitz-1 was built on the site of the former barracks of the Polish army. Immediately, people who make up the elite of Poland are sent to the camp: doctors, politicians, lawyers, scientists. By the autumn of 1941, 10 thousand prisoners of war of the Soviet army joined the political prisoners.
Conditions of prisoners in Auschwitz
The Auschwitz Museum keeps secret drawings painted on the walls of the barracks as evidence of the conditions of detention and living in the camp.
Prisoners huddled in twenty-four brick barracks, where they slept in twos on extremely narrow bunks. The ration was a piece of bread and a bowl of watery stew.
Anyone who violated the established camp system was in for a brutal beating by prison guards. Considering the Poles as representatives of an inferior race, the guard could humiliate, hit or kill. The task of Auschwitz is to sow terror among the entire Polish population. The entire territory of the camp along the perimeter was surrounded by a double fence with barbed wire connected to the electric current.
Also, control over the prisoners was carried out by criminal prisoners who were brought fromGerman camps. They were called capos. These were people who did not know empathy or compassion.
Life in the camp directly depended on the place of work by distribution. Snapped up was work indoors. Labor on the street, under the blows of a capo, is a death sentence. Any misconduct is the road to death in Block No. 11. The arrested, kept in the basement, were beaten, starved, or simply left to die. They could have been sent to one of the four standing cells for the night. The Auschwitz Museum has preserved these torture chambers.
There were also cells for political prisoners. They were brought from all over the region. The Auschwitz Museum has preserved the wall of death, located in the courtyard of the block. Up to 5,000 people were executed here a day. Patients who ended up in the hospital, but did not have time to quickly get on their feet, were killed by an SS doctor. It was supposed to feed only those who could work. In two years, more than ten thousand lives of Polish prisoners were claimed by the future Auschwitz Museum. Poland will never forget these atrocities.
Second Auschwitz
In October 1941, near the village of Birkenau, the Nazis founded a second camp, originally intended for prisoners of war of the Soviet army. Auschwitz-2 was 20 times larger and had 200 barracks for prisoners. Now some of the wooden barracks have collapsed, but the stone chimneys of the stoves have been preserved by the Auschwitz Museum. The decision taken in Berlin during the winter concerning the Jewish question changed the purpose of the appointment. Now Auschwitz II was meant for the mass murder of Jews.
But first he has a significant role inmassacres did not play, but was used as a place for the deportation of Jews from the captured southern, northern, Scandinavian and Balkan countries. It later became the largest death machine.
In the summer of 1942, both Jews and other prisoners began to arrive in Birkenau from all over occupied Europe. Their landing was carried out six hundred meters from the main gate. Later, to speed up the killing process, rails were laid to the barracks themselves. Arriving passengers went through a selection process that determined who would work and who would go to the gas chamber and then to the Auschwitz oven.
Having laid down their belongings, the doomed were divided into two groups: men and women with children. After some time, their fate was decided. Some of the able-bodied young prisoners were sent to a labor camp, and the bulk of the people, including children, pregnant women, the elderly and the disabled, were sent to the gas chambers, and then to the crematorium oven. The very same selection process was captured by an unknown SS officer in the form of photographic material, although the order from above forbade filming the massacres.
When Jews from all over Europe arrived in Birkenau in 1942, there was only one gas chamber in the camp, which was installed in a cottage. But the advent of four new gas chambers in 1944 made Auschwitz II the worst massacre ever.
The productivity of crematoria has reached one and a half thousand people a day. And although a few days before the arrival of the Red Army, the ovens of Auschwitz were blown up by the Germans, one of the pipes of the crematorium oven survived. It is still kept inmuseum. Poland intends to restore the wooden barracks, which were burned or destroyed over time.
Survival in Auschwitz
Survival in the camp depended on a combination of different factors: self-preservation instinct, connections, luck, cunning when naming nationality, age and profession. But the main condition for survival was the ability to organize everything related to barter: sell, buy, get food. At the same time, it was important to get into a good working group, for example, in the B2G sector.
The belongings of the new prisoners were here. Naturally, all the most valuable things were sent to Germany, but while working here, it was possible, at great risk to life, for something valuable hidden in things - a gold ring, a diamond, money - to be exchanged for food on the camp black market or used for bribing the SS.
Work sets you free
All the prisoners passing through the central entrance of the death camp saw what was written on the gates of Auschwitz. In German it means: "Work makes you free."
What is written on the gates of Auschwitz is the height of cynicism and lies. Labor will never free a person in a concentration camp who was originally sentenced to death. Only death itself or, in rare cases, escape.
First gas chambers
The first experiments with gas chambers in Auschwitz were carried out in September 1941. Then hundreds of Soviet and Polish prisoners were sent to the basement of block 11 and were killed with poison - a pesticide based on the cyanide Zyklon - B. Now the Auschwitz camp, which was no different frommany other camps, took the first step to become an important link in solving the Jewish question.
When the deportation of Jews began, allegedly for resettlement to the east, newcomers were herded into the former premises of ammunition depots, which were located away from the main camp. The doomed were told that they were brought to work, thereby helping Germany; But first you need to be disinfected. The victims were sent to the gas chamber, equipped as a shower room. Cyclone-B crystals were poured through a hole in the roof.
Evacuation of prisoners
In 1944, the Auschwitz site was a network of camps that sent more than ten thousand people a day to the construction of a German chemical plant. Labor in more than forty camps was used in a variety of areas: construction, agriculture, industry.
By mid-1944, the Third Reich was under threat. Alarmed by the rapid advance of the Soviet troops, the Nazis dismantled and blew up the crematoria, hiding the traces of the crimes. The camp was empty, the evacuation of prisoners began. On January 17, 1945, 50 thousand prisoners passed along the Polish roads. They were driven to Germany. Thousands of barefoot and half-dressed people died from the frost on the way. Prisoners who were exhausted and lagging behind the column were shot by guards. It was the death march of the prisoners of the Auschwitz camp. The concentration camp museum keeps portraits of many of them in the corridors of the barracks.
Liberation
A few days afterevacuation of prisoners in Auschwitz entered the Soviet troops. About seven thousand half-dead prisoners, emaciated and sick, were found on the territory of the camp. They simply did not have time to shoot: there was not enough time. These are living witnesses of the genocide of the Jewish people.
231 soldiers of the Red Army were killed in the battles for the liberation of Auschwitz. They all found peace in the mass grave of this city.
They survived Auschwitz
January 17 marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camp Auschwitz. But even today the prisoners of the camp, who survived all the horrors of the genocide, are still alive.
Zdizslava Volodarchyk: “I found the barracks where they kept me and other children. Bed bugs, lice, rats. But I survived Auschwitz.”
Klavdia Kovacic: “I spent three years in the camp. Constant hunger and cold. But I survived Auschwitz.”
From June 1940 to January 1945, 400 thousand children were destroyed. This must not happen again.
Exposing the perpetrators of genocide
Rudolf Hess, commandant of Auschwitz, betrayed by the Polish Supreme People's Court and hanged in Auschwitz at the site of the camp Gestapo headquarters in 1947.
Josef Kramer, commandant of Birkenau, hanged in a German prison in 1945.
Richard Baer, the last commandant of Auschwitz, died in 1960 awaiting trial.
Josef Mengele, the angel of death escaped punishment, died in Brazil in 1979.
Trials of war criminals continued into the 60s and 70s of the 20th century. Many of them have suffered well-deserved punishment.
