HELL

There should have been dark dreary gray clouds with rain threatening but it was a beautiful sunny day.  Exactly what I didn’t want.  It made it seem that more surreal.

We stood on the platform where the cattle car transports dumped out their human cargo.  The angel of death, Dr. Mengele, was there to greet you and decided with a quick glance if you lived a little longer or were immediately sent to death.  The last time you saw your family.  

After visiting the site of the greatest mass murder in the history of the world how do you describe the mountain of shoes, eyeglasses, suitcases, children’s clothing, human hair ?   Maybe you could talk about the barracks conditions where inmates were crammed 8-10 in a space that was meant for 4 while rats visited at night and lice tortured them.  The communal toilets that accommodated 20 people at a time where you were given 3 minutes to do what you needed to do in front of everyone ?

Block 11 was especially evil.  The torture building.  If you were told to report there for some tiny infraction it was a really good chance that you would never come out alive.  There were rooms where people were purposely starved to death, suffocated or just put in front of the firing squad wall.  Very organized and brutally efficient.  The Nazis had it all down to a slick running killing machine.

On their best days they ran 10,000 thru the gas chambers and ovens.  They ran out of places to dump the ashes so it was used as fertilizer.

This sadistic play ground had a brothel.  In a moment of softness Himmler thought the deserving Sondercommando (Jews who manned the gas chambers and crematorium) should have a little entertainment before they too were put to death.  What a guy.

Our guide spoke with great respect for the million plus people who died there in its 4 years of operation and I’m not posting pictures because you’ve all seen them.  Or if you haven’t you should.

I went on this trip to bear witness.  

When I get home I want to hug my children and grandchildren so tight that nothing could ever hurt them.

The Factory on Lipowa Street

 He didn’t start out as a hero or even a very good guy; an early member of the Nazi party, wife cheating party animal, unsuccessful businessman and spy for the Abwehr.  Early in September 1939 when the Nazis occupied Poland he went to Krakow looking for a business to buy from some unfortunate Jew who was being forced by the new conquerors to sell their business.  At a significant discount.  Jewish forced labor was significantly less expensive than paying Polish workers so he was an opportunist looking for a deal.  

He knew nothing about the manufacture of enamelware, or anything else for that matter, but a chance to cash in on the misfortune of others was too lucrative to pass up so he went in the pots and pans business.

By wining and dining and bribes with valuable Black Market goods Nazi officials to give him whatever permits he needed and all the cheap Jewish labor he could use, money started rolling in and before too long he was a very rich man.   Still a scoundrel, and still consorting with the extreme sadist Commandant of the camp that supplied him his workers.  The Commandant used the camp inmates for target practice and killed over 500 of them for sport off the balcony of his office overlooking the courtyard.  

A work permit as an essential worker in his factory was a ticket to live a little longer; highly sought after among those doomed to be shipped off to Auschwitz.  Somehow he was able to acquire 350 workers.  The majority of them had no practical metal working experience but he gave them a chance.

The 68,000 Jews of Krakow were all destined to be exterminated.  It took awhile but as things got worse in the Ghetto and camp our guy started to really noticed the horrific treatment that his SS drinking buddies were inflicting on the doomed.  He witnessed things that are unspeakable.  It changed him.

As the 68,000 were nearly exterminated he came up with an idea to save some.  He convinced the Nazis that he was going to convert the pots and pans factory into a munitions plant.  He would need 1,200 workers.  He had his secretary type a list of names of very lucky people to be spared as the last transports rolled out of town.

They were able to wait out the rest of the war until the Soviets liberated them in January 1945.

Our hero was Oskar Schindler of course.  You have probably seen the Spielberg movie.  As his survivors were freed he was the one now fleeing as a war criminal.  He was broke from spending all his riches helping the 1,200 live.  He lived a life of failed businesses after the war and ended up being supported by a Jewish relief organization.  He died in 1974 and was honored by being buried in Mt. Zion cemetery in Jerusalem; an honor give to few non Jews. He was also presented with the “Righteous Among Nations” award from Yad Vashem. 

There are over 6,000 Schindler Jewish descendants today.

We visited his factory this afternoon.  It houses a museum and was very inspirational.  Sometimes good wins over evil.

We have visited so many important WW2 locations this week.   We stood below the balcony that the psycho Commandant shot people for sport.  At Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair in Prussia we saw the ruins of his command post in Poland and site of the failed Valkyrie assassination attempt of July 20, 1944.  The Warsaw Ghetto (watch the movie the Pianist).  Many monuments and war museums.  The site of the Solidarity movement by Leif Walenska in the 80’s that finally freed the Polish people from Soviet oppression.  Gestapo headquarters and the Polish Post office where Polish Boy Scouts tried to hold off the Nazis in the invasion.   Plaques everywhere commemorating a site where people were murdered by the Nazis.  So much war overload in this resilient country.  The punching bag of Europe.

I have a new understanding of what the Poles went through and are amazed at how determined they are to be free.

Our last stop this afternoon was the town square where the selections for transport to Auschwitz were made. Families waited there to see if it was their day to die.  There are many empty chairs in the large square signifying the people who were murdered.  Very simple but very effective.

The group of WW2 history nerds I am fortunate to be traveling with come from all over the USA.  Our historian, Chris Anderson, consulted with Spielberg when The Band of Brothers was put together.  Extremely knowledgeable about the war and Poland.

Not quite sure what to expect tomorrow.  My fellow travelers and I want to make this journey but will probably be glad when it’s over.

Hell Bound Train

So my son asked me why off all the cool places there are to go why would I want to go to Poland? We're not even Polish Mom ??  

Specifically to visit Auschwitz.

That sounds a little nuts even to a history nerd like me.  But for some reason beyond my control I yearn to go there.  It nags at me.  I think about it a lot.  I have read countless books about it for many years.  It's a pilgrimage that I need to get out of the way to get some peace; if that's even possible by going there.  

Stephen Ambrose, one of my favorite history writers and tour creator, took me from D-Day to the Rhine and through the Origins of the Third Reich in the past few years.  Fascinating trips. Life changing trips. Now his company is offering a Beginning and Ending of WW2 tour that of course will visit the epitome of Hell on Earth in a little Polish town called Oswiecim (Polish for Auschwitz) and end in Berlin.  It's a lengthy tour and visits war museum after war museum and monuments to the brave resistance fighters, the Schindler factory and Stalag 3 (site of the Great Escape).  Pretty sure there is no boating involved on this trip so I am going solo as it's not really Dave's thing.   The cool thing for me on these history journeys is that all the other people on the tour are there because they want to be (except for the occasional spouse who went along to keep peace).

The historians on my past tours have been very skilled at bringing history to life.   They describe  events that happened right where you are standing and they make it personal by telling 80+ year old stories of real people.  Unbelievable stories; but true.

I have tried to imagine thousands of times what it felt like to be in one of the cattle cars on the way to Hell.  Not knowing, or maybe knowing, what would happen when the doors were flung open and selections were made.  Would Dr. Mengele point me to the right or left?  To die by starvation, slave labor and disease slowly or die instantly in the gas chambers ?  

Visiting the concentration camp, Dachau, in Munich, was a somber experience.  Thousands died there; mainly of disease, starvation or beatings.  Though it wasn't an extermination camp.  It was to detain political prisoners and if they died in the meantime, oh well.

Auschwitz was created specifically to kill people.  A very efficient killing factory.  Usually those chosen for the gas chambers died within an hour of arriving at the camp. Hitler's Final Solution went after  Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Jehovas, people who spoke out against the Fuehrer and others deemed undesirable and not worthy of life.  

While working at a department store in high school I made a friend there that was Jewish.  His name was Sandy.  Quite the novelty for a coal miner's daughter from white bread West Virginia.  His family had lost many relatives in the Holocaust.  Since the public school system didn't really teach us much, if anything, about that I was stunned at things he told me.  He was a young man working his way through law school at the time. His Mother and Father were very tortured by the loss of their relatives.  Somehow they had made it safely to the USA before the war started.  I went to their home for dinner once and they showed me the family album; pointing out many relatives that had perished in gas chambers or other violent deaths at the hands of the Nazis in small Polish villages. Being an unsophisticated, wide eyed, teenager at the time I'm not sure how I handled it when they wept over the pictures.

Sandy gave me a book to read entitled  "The Painted Bird" by Jerzy Kosinski.  It's the story of a young Jewish boy that was separated from his family and wanders around Poland during the Nazi occupation trying to survive among peasant villagers.  Very dark and graphic.  While it may be fiction, many think it was based in the author's own experiences as a child.  It's a very difficult book to get through.  It affected me like no book ever has.  Still sticks with me.  I read it again a few years ago and yeah, still powerful.  I believe that it was made into a movie but I don't want to go there again.  

So this trip is party because of that friend and that book.