A visit to Auschwitz and the thoughts that can’t be ignored

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It was chilly on the train from Krakow back to Warsaw. The winter sun had set hours before; it was moonless and dark, a fitting postscript for this day when I toured Auschwitz, the World War II Nazi death camp.

As I stared out at nothing, a curtain of shame enveloped for my ethnic link to the monsters who tortured and murdered millions at concentration camps, some in my lifetime.

How could this have happened?

Germany was civilized, its history rich and its people educated. But the 1920s to ‘30s were times of economic hardship, including encumbrances the Treaty of Versailles placed on Germany for its role in World War I.

The Nazi Party rose from the mire by preying on popular anxieties while blaming Jews for the country’s misery. Adolf Hitler ascended to power with mesmeric oratory and deceitful propaganda.

Our Auschwitz guide, a history student at Warsaw University, spoke excellent English, with piercing eye contact punctuating her telling the place’s hideous tales. She didn’t smile once during the hourslong tour.

We stood on the platform where, in the early 1940s, trains regularly unloaded up to 2,000 weary and anxious captives from throughout Europe. Trips often outlasted food supplies.

Some 80 souls were packed into repurposed cattle cars, sans toilets or heat. Doors locked shut, the human stench mixed with pungent odor of those who died en route.

Mostly Jewish passengers included whole families who brought only what fit into a suitcase. They’d be going to a work camp, they were told, and better lives — lies, to not arouse suspicion of their fate.

A small band of prisoners who knew about Auschwitz played upbeat tunes to fill the platform air with joy, more deception.

Nazi doctors separated those able to work or had other value, like ghastly medical experiments by the “angel of death,” Josef Mengele.

The elderly, feeble and nearly all women and kids were ushered toward smoke rising from chimneys at the camp’s far end. There, they carefully placed luggage and had their heads shaved before entering a large room for “cleansing,” after which they’d reclaim belongings. More lies.

The “bathhouse” was complete with fake shower heads. Doors sealed, rooftop soldiers dropped Zyklon B pellets down tubes that released a searing, deadly gas on air contact. All would succumb in 15 minutes; screams during first moments were muffled by soldiers revving motorcycle engines. Victims’ fingernail scratches were on walls.

Prisoners assumed the grim task of removing bodies, and prying open mouths to remove metal fillings. Bodies were piled into a crematory and set ablaze — creating the smoke seen by new arrivals.

Again, how could this have happened?

There were four large gas chambers in the Birkenau section and a smaller one at nearby Auschwitz I. When daily executions exceeded crematoria capacity, bodies were burned in large pits.

Men assigned to labor initially knew nothing of the fate of the others. They’d soon face their own horrors, with death by starvation, torture, overwork or horrific medical experiments (“quality” skeletons of the dead were availed for display in medical labs).

I knew about the Holocaust, but it’s far different being among footsteps of the doomed, seeing gas chambers and piles of victims’ ransacked luggage.

Some of the shaved hair was blended into fabric for military uniforms. One display showed small shoes of children who perished.

Why Auschwitz and southern Poland?

In addition to being declared national enemies, Jews “contaminated” the “superior” Aryan race. Nazis’ wont to rid the menace rationalized genocide on a stunning scale, its pace accelerated with Hitler’s “Final Solution” dictate. A large extermination camp was needed.

Oswiecim (“Auschwitz” in German), an hour west of Krakow, met all criteria — central in Nazi territory, good rail access and a small Indigenous population. Plus, it had quality brick buildings once used as army barracks. Birkenau (the complex’s larger unit) was named after Brzezinka, a village demolished to clear vast space for the camp and a wide buffer to keep outsiders out.

Notorious commandant Rudolph Höss testified at postwar Nuremberg trials that 3 million perished at Auschwitz. Experts agree on 1.1 million, though counts are problematic because records were purposely destroyed.

But how could Auschwitz be kept secret when some 145 escapees told Allies their stories? The guide said first accounts were dismissed as wild exaggeration.

The midafternoon sun was low as our group moved from Birkenau to Auschwitz 1, where administrators and some 20,000 prisoners were housed.

Prisoners there rose pre-dawn and stood hours for roll, with the overnight dead carried to the count line. Wearing scant clothing despite winter’s cold, prisoners ate small portions of bread and broth before trudging to work under the infamous sign, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work makes you free); a prisoner band played.

After working long hours, prisoners stood for another count, carrying with them the day’s dead. A faulty count meant prisoners being severely beaten or hanged on the spot if they couldn’t explain why.

Disrespecting prisoners faced a farcical “court” with the “convicted” shot dead at an outside wall. Others were so packed into 16-square-foot stalls they couldn’t lie down. Some died in starvation cells, some in crowded, airtight cubes with oxygen deliberately depleted.

The guide said a 9-year-old girl, accused of smuggling food, faced the “court” of booted, uniformed men who ordered execution at the wall. Try to imagine any child in that little girl’s place.

Again and again, how could it all happen?

Nazis knew their deeds at Auschwitz would be harshly judged at war’s end. Destroyed gas chambers and other evidence saved most camp guards from prosecution.

But Rudolph Höss, who perfected mass killing by gas, was publicly hanged at Auschwitz. Hans Frank, governor of Nazi-occupied Poland where he lived lavishly in Krakow while overseeing several death camps, was hanged in Nuremberg.

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Later, at home in Minnesota, thoughts of Auschwitz often welled up, lately alongside the alarming normalization of disinformation and outright lies in America’s public discourse.

My late mother-in-law, a full-blood, proud German who spoke little English before school, despised the Third Reich. She wondered how people could do such appalling things, and how so many believed Nazi lies.

Don’t tell small lies, Hitler’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels would say. Tell big lies, repeat them often and they’ll be believed.

“Listen, buster,” Marian, my mother-in-law, told me sternly. “What happened in Germany could happen again, and it could happen here.”

Many think it’s already begun.

Ron Way lives in Minneapolis. He’s at ron-way@comcast.net.