Check our website: www.westfaliadigitalnomads.com and follow us on social media at: https://www.facebook.com/WestfaliaDigitalNomads
A walk through Auschwitz concentration camp.
Nothing can prepare you for Auschwitz.
Really. Nothing.
It's a surreal combination of sorrow and horror; sorrow at so much loss; horror at what we as humans are capable of.
It was jarring to see a stork, oblivious, making its home on the ground inside the barbed fences.
Auschwitz-Birkenau had its first prisoners in 1940. They were Polish.
They had their first murders (called 'exterminations') in September of 1941, using Zyklon B.
The Zyklon B pellets, when mixed with water, took up to 20 minutes to kill.
The gas chambers may have been razed, but they survive in our minds.
Auschwitz, and its 2 sites that included 45 satellite camps, is estimated to have killed over 1.1 million people. Let's speak numbers:
90% were Jewish
150,000 were Polish
23,000 were Romani
10s of thousands were of the wrong religion or the wrong 'sort,' like gays
In the end, after the war, out of the 7,000 members of staff at Auschwitz:
Only 15% were convicted of war crimes
All of the staff were guilty of: starving, forcing labor, executing and allowing medical experimentation via Mengele's child torture.
The stork was a perfect representation of now. Resurrection, rebirth, regeneration.
We watched several generations walking the paths of Auschwitz, holding hands, making the promise:
Never Again.
