Auschwitz

I visited two former Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz, now Polish national museums, in June of 2001. The older one, Auschwitz I, was a work camp, created to house the slave labor for a nearby IG Farben factory. The other, Auschwitz II - Birkenau, was established slightly later specifically for large-scale slaughter of people using gas chambers. Both camps were death camps, however; the only way for the prisoners to leave was as smoke from the crematorium chimneys. The only difference was the cause of death. Most of the prisoners at Auschwitz I starved or died of disease because of the hard work and tiny rations, whereas most of the prisoners at Auschwitz II-Birkenau were poisoned in enclosed gas chambers with Zyklon II. Today, the Auschwitz museums are a very quiet place, generally preserved as they were left in 1945, but without the people or the smoke. The exhibits are very subtly presented, emphasizing the scale and deliberateness of the long massacre that occurred there.