On travel writing trips I always keep a diary to record personal impressions outside of the ‘who, what, when, where, why’ of newspaper copy. The diary runs to more than half a million words. 

I’ve never shared it but the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz made me reread my diary of a three-day trip to Krakow. It runs to 6,000 words. I planned to share an edited account of my Auschwitz day trip on Monday’s anniversary until flu struck. Here it is:

… Auschwitz 1 is a former Polish army barracks of three-storey red brick buildings set on a grid of tree-lined streets. It looks like a neat suburban housing estate.

… Suddenly we were confronted with the iron gates beneath the sign ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – work makes you free. Packed beneath was a mass of Israeli students waving flags, posing for photos.

… Auschwitz 2 Birkenau was a massive murder factory with a 12 kilometre perimeter, scores of long wooden barracks in immaculate rows. The camp killed some 1.1million people, 90 per cent were Jews. Others included political opponents, gipsies, homosexuals, blacks and the disabled.

… SS doctors chose who would live to be worked to death and those to be gassed immediately. An average of 25 per cent were selected to live. Mothers were classified as unfit.

… The condemned were herded into ‘showers’ for ‘disinfection’ and once locked in were gassed using Zyklon B. Then the Sonderkommando teams of Jewish prisoners collected valuables and took the bodies to the crematoria. The camp could burn 12,000 victims a day. 

… One display contained a heap of empty Zyklon B containers. They looked like catering cans of baked beans. You could see where they had been roughly cut open. A cabinet held a scattering of Zyklon B crystals, pale blue-green tablets that could have been Viagra.

… In a display cabinet in a long gloomy room was what looked like a high bank of moss behind the glass. It was human hair. You could make out different styles, curls and plaits, braids and knots. Running through the rippled slope of dusty dun were rivulets of blonde. The next block contained a fur ball of wire-rimmed spectacles like a giant unravelling Brillo pad.

… A display of luggage, many cases marked in the owners’ immaculate handwritten scripts – Margarete Glaser, 14-8-1897 – Marie Kafka, Prague – M Frank, Holland 12-4-15 – Klement Hedwig 8.10.1898. Close by was a cabinet of baby shoes and clothes. 

… A hallway was lined with hundreds of mug shots. The dead eyes of living men showed fear, defiance or defeat. Quite a few of the women seemed to be trying to smile. 

… In the main square was the gibbet, a metal rail supported by three posts where a dozen could be hanged at a time. It was used to execute camp commandant Rudolf Hoess in 1947. 

… Climbed the watchtower to look over Birkenau. Some barracks at the front were intact but behind only the concrete base, stoves and brick chimneys survive.

… At the rear were the gas chambers and crematoria, blown up by the retreating Germans, and the pool used to dump the ashes of the dead.

©BILLTODD