As someone who’s grown up with the internet, you become hardened and desensitised to most things. There’s all sorts of horrific things flying around, some fake, some real and nothing really shocks any more. Most people have heard of Auschwitz and know what it is, they know what happened there and that’s about as far as it goes. The enormity of the horrors which occurred there only really hit home when you start reading up about it and watching a few documentaries, including some tear jerking recollections from some of the very few surviving escapees of the camps. A group of us decided to visit while we were on a trip to Krakow. Nothing… and I mean, nothing could have prepared me for what I saw and the emotions I felt that day.

I’d been warned by a few people about 2 main things, the shoes and the hair. Sure I’d heard stories about there being containers with some shoes in and other containers with some hair in. On first arrival at the camps, you’re almost lulled into a false sense of location. It feels a bit like a museum, groups of tourists gathering in the lobby, collecting their audio-guide headsets and waiting for guided tours. This isn’t what I had in mind at all. We decided to make our own way round rather than join a group for a tour. We encountered small artefacts behind glass cases, placards in various languages explaining what things are and posters and diagrams on the walls. Then you turn a corner into the next room and you see it. To begin with, I couldn’t quite work out what I was looking at. The sheer volume made it seem like something it wasn’t. The hair!! Piles and piles of it, the room was meters long. I pressed my face up against the glass and took in this grim spectacle before me. Shades of every colour hair, plaited locks simply lopped off in one, wispy white and grey hair from the elderly, curly black cuttings perhaps from a toddler, who knows? The hair was stacked high, untouched now for the best part of 70 years like the production of a cotton wool factory. This was a factory too, a factory of mass murder and death. I wanted to look away or leave the room but I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. My mouth hung open in disbelief at the sheer volume, it was like a punch in the stomach, a sudden realisation of the magnitude of what happened here and I was overwhelmed by emotion.

The first thing you notice when you enter Auschwitz I complex is that famous gateway with the phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei” looming above it. The phrase translates to “Work makes (you) free” and was erected by prisoners with metal work skills by order of Major Rudolf Hoss in June 1940. The deceitful Nazi slogan was meant to convey to the prisoners who passed under it that they could attain ‘spiritual’ freedom through hard work for the Fatherland. But for most, it was the inscription on a gateway to a living hell. The sign you see here is in fact a replica. The original was stolen by thieves in December 2009 and was recovered in 3 pieces. It now resides in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Two Polish were later sentenced to jail for the act.

Imposing double layered electrified barbed wire fences surround the perimeter with wooden watch towers periodically dotted along it’s circumference. A sign reading “Warning, High Voltage” in front of the fences. Atop each tower stood a smartly uniformed SS guard pointing a gun into the camp. Managing to get past this unnoticed would be a near impossible task. Lethal voltages (>10,000 Volts) and currents were employed, continuously rather than in pulses. Some prisoners used the electric barbed wire fence to commit suicide as a way of escaping this misery.

The hair. You really can’t get any sort of perspective from this image how much there was. This is just a small snapshot of the sheer amount.

Zyklon-B. The trademark name for the pesticide used for the mass killings at the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Zyklon-B came in pellet form which when exposed to the atmosphere let off a noxious gas containing hydrogen cyanide which interferes with the respiratory system. The gas chambers needed to be heated because the pellets wouldn’t vapourize unless above 27 degrees C. This chemical claimed the lives of around a million people, mostly Jews at the extermination camps.

Another sight that will live with me forever is that inside Block 5 of the converted barracks at Auschwitz I. The entire length of the room, some 20 meters long with only a narrow glass corridor separating either side, was filled with shoes. Each pair of shoes representing the senseless sacrifice of another human life. The most disturbing part about this was the fact that this amount of shoes represented just one days collection at the peak of the gassing.

Another room in Block 5 housed a disturbing amount of suit cases, each inscribed with the name and date of birth of it’s owner. Many of these cases contained family treasures and heirlooms and were taken from the prisoners upon arrival at the camps.

Block 11, probably the most feared bock in the whole complex. Also known by the prisoners as “Death Block” which is ironic in a camp operating solely for that purpose. Block 11 was the punishment block where prisoners were sent for trying to escape or not cooperating. It was basically a torture chamber. It contained things such as “standing cells” tiny cells only 30 inches square which made it impossible to sit, crouch or lay down. They had no light, no heating or cooling systems and the floors were covered with excrement from previous prisoners. Sometimes as many as 3 prisoners were made to crawl into a single tiny cell.

Below is a collection of images of the crematoria at Auschwitz I. Another image that will live with me forever is that of the scratch marks on the walls inside the chambers. Each mark painfully scored into the wall by human nails as a last ditch survival attempt. You can see the detail the Nazi’s went into when constructing this factory of death. The production-line style efficiency was shocking. You can see carriages for manoeuvring the corpses on a rail system to make it quicker and easier to load the corpses into the incinerators.

3km away lies the second, larger camp of Auschwitz Birkenau. Already shocked at the enormity of the operation at Auschwitz I, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. It dwarfed Auschwitz I by comparison, rows and rows of buildings stretched before me as far as the eye could see. That train line entering the camp that I was so familiar with from seeing so many photographs beforehand now lay front of me. Construction of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp was started in October of 1941, as part of a plan to ease congestion at the first camp. Whereas Auschwitz I was adapted from existing artillery barracks however, Auschwitz Birkenau was designed with the sole purpose of extermination en masse and was soon to become an even more ruthlessly efficient processing facility.

Walking the path of the train tracks it was easy to see how the camp would have functioned. Trains passed the checkpoint at the main building to pull up alongside platforms, where their cargo would be unloaded. Under the view of numerous watchtowers, inmates would be sorted according to worth before being herded through a series of gates and holding pens. A number of low buildings provided storage space, after looking inside these bleak huts lined with wooden shelves, I can’t quite bring myself to call them ‘accommodation’. Inmates were kept in the most appalling conditions, each shelf you see here would house up to 9 inmates. Conditions were cold, cramped, dirty and disease ridden.