Auschwitz & Auschwitz-Birkenau (multimedia report)

As a Jewish girl growing up in the United States, the Holocaust was an extremely large part of my World War II history education. In both religious school and public school, World War II became synonymous with the horrible atrocities and mass murders committed by the German Nazi party against minorities, mainly the Jewish people.

 Adolf Hitler of the Nazi party came into power as Chancellor of Germany in early 1933 and almost immediately began incorporating his anti-Semitic ideologies into German law. In the late 1930s, the Nazi German military, known as the SS began placing minorities, including Jews in concentration camps to separate them from the rest of German society. Auschwitz, known today as the largest and most brutal of all Nazi concentration camps, opened in Poland in May 1940. In its early years, Auschwitz was used as a holding camp for political prisoners and prisoners of war. Nobody, not even Hitler himself, nor his main assistant Himmler would have predicted that Auschwitz would swell into the largest site of mass murder in world history. Between 1940 and 1945, the Nazis expanded Auschwitz to a second site, Auschwitz-Birkenau, complete with two massive crematoriums used for the gassing and burning of the bodies of more than two and a half million Jewish people from all over Europe.

 For nearly three years, approximately 1942-1945, Jews and minorities from throughout Europe were transported by train to the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Upon arrival, those who Nazi doctors and physicians decided were “fit to work” were separated from those who were considered useless to the Nazi German state. The people classified as “unfit to work”, including mostly women and children were almost immediately stripped of their personal belongings, including clothing and even hair, and then sent directly to the gas chambers where they were murdered by gassing, cremated, and essentially disposed of entirely. Almost 65 years later, the site of these murders leaves behind and eerie feeling and leaves visitors of Auschwitz with a general state of uneasiness.

While living in Barcelona, Spain for four months, I felt it necessary to take the short trip to Poland to visit this important site in world history. Being Jewish, I not only feel a connection to the Holocaust itself, but also take great interest in World War II history and the crimes committed by the German Nazi military party.

Today, almost the entire Auschwitz concentration camp remains standing, open to the public as a museum dedicated to the memory of the horrible tragedy that occurred there and in the memory of the victims who were killed. People from all over the world travel to Poland to the site of Auschwitz to learn, connect, remember, and pray about what has occurred so recently in history. 

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