Class Trip to Auschwitz

Monday morning the alarm rang extra early, so it's a good thing that we had 'fallen back' from daylight savings time on Saturday night.  It was daylight by the time we headed for school at 6:15 to board the charter bus for a field trip to Poland.  The class teachers had invited us along to visit the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps.  Two of my three classes on Mondays are with these classes, so I only had one set of sub plans to write.  Tim had told the kids that we would be having a 10-hour English conversation class on Monday!  

Our wonderful II.A5 and II.A4 classes on the bus.  

Our first view of the Auschwitz concentration camp.  There were already 20 army barracks in this location, so that's why this spot was chosen.  The Germans then cleared out the surrounding villages completely, to isolate the camp area, far away from any populated area, to preserve secrecy.  

The famous sign above the camp entrance:  Work makes (you) free.   The original sign was stolen a few years ago but then recovered, so this is a replica, and the original is now in a museum for safety.  

Walking through the gates into the camp is very foreboding.  The barbed wire fences were also electrified, well-lit, and of course under the watchful eye of armed guards.  No one really had any chance of escaping, but some still tried because of the certainty of death in one way or another.  However, those who were killed trying to escape also knew that their families and friends would be killed as a result, so that threat was a huge deterrent. 

The photo in front of this building shows the camp orchestra playing here as each new group of prisoners entered the gates.  This was to give the illusion that all was well and it really was just a 'work camp', as part of the overall plan to create compliant victims.  

We had a guide who spoke into a headset microphone, which transmitted into our headsets.  The guide spoke in Slovak, but Lucia, one of the teachers, translated for us.  We also changed channels and eavesdropped on a guide for an English-speaking group for part of the time.  The former barracks are now set up as museums.

Every single part of the whole Holocaust is horrifying, but one part that was very unsettling was the industrialization of the whole process, evident in the massive and systematic organizing of all the personal items taken from the victims.  

I remember this display from 1976 when I visited Auschwitz on a college choir tour to Poland with the Clarke-Loras Singers.  These thousands of shoes represent in such a poignant way the many, many human lives taken.

Inside some of the buildings we also saw the authentic living quarters for prisoners, jail cells, punishment areas, and walls covered with haunting photographs of individual prisoners with their names and dates of birth, entrance to the camp, and death.  There was generally not a long interval between the second and third dates.  

Eventually the camp was separated into men's and women's areas, also divided by electrified barbed wire fences.  

We got back on the bus to go just a few kilometers to the Birkenau concentration camp, which was built later expressly for mass extermination.  

Birkenau is literally in the middle of nowhere - intentionally very isolated so people wouldn't know about the dreadful actions taking place there.  

They even built a train track directly into Birkenau to make the transportation process more efficient.  There was an immediate selection process, and the vast majority were sent to one of the gas chambers - the young, the old, and the weak had no chance of survival at all, and the others subjected to hard labor were brutally treated and given only sub-survival nourishment, so they didn't survive very long either.  

600 people slept in a barracks like this, 8 men to a bed.  There were over 300 wooden buildings built at Birkenau, including the barracks and other buildings.  Most of the camp was burned and destroyed by the Nazis as the war was ending, to eliminate evidence of the Holocaust.  There are no mass graves in the area, since the corpses were all burned in the four giant crematoriums.  

After a couple hours on the bus heading back into Slovakia, we took a break from the trip in Námestovo, which is a beautiful resort town in the mountains near a big lake.  It reminded us a little of Okoboji!  Tim insisted on taking a picture of the girls -- the teachers chaperoning the trip -- Katka, Lucia, and Janka.  

They said this place is full of families in the summertime, swimming, playing, and enjoying the lakeside.  

We had hot tea and coffee overlooking the lake before getting back on the bus.  

"Dobrou chut'!" literally means "good taste", or "enjoy your meal", and we hear it before every single meal with any Slovak friends - at school, in homes, and from the waiter in a restaurant.  But it was so funny to see it on a Heinz label!!  LOL!! 

Some of our students relaxing by the lake just before heading back to the bus.  

This beautiful sunset over a local church was the perfect ending to our rest stop!  And it reminded us of God's incredible love for His people, after our day spent visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau.