Seeing History Firsthand

A Historian’s Blog of Poland

Meg Brosneck

Two brick buildings surrounded by grass. On the right side of the photo is a rocky and muddy path, and towards the bottom it connects to another path made of wooden planks.

Barracks at Auschwitz II-Birkenau

Poland is a beautiful country to visit, but its beauty was not the reason for our visit. The main reason belonged to one of the most horrific places in history: Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Three wooden bunks stacked on top of each other. The wooden planks making up the “mattresses” are cracked and old, and the walls are made of decaying brick. There is a window in the back.

Bunks in the barracks

Though the story of Auschwitz is well-known in history classes, the true scope of its horror cannot be understood without visiting the location itself. Some of the buildings were transformed into museum exhibits. Most of these are on the main camp, and they were the first places we visited. While they included some important photos and explanations, the most important exhibits came from the Holocaust victims’ personal belongings. Entire rooms are dedicated to displaying the pots and pans, shoes, or suitcases a fraction of the victims had brought with them. They are all that remains of entire families. The Nazis collected everything the Jews had to sell or distribute after they murdered them. While the physical items were horrible to look at, nothing came close to the room filled with several tons of human hair. The Nazis shaved their victims heads and sold their hair as a product, and Auschwitz still has some of it behind glass cages. No pictures were allowed.

A largely empty, concrete and brick courtyard between two buildings. There is a wall at the far end with flowers in front of it as a memorial to the prisoners the Nazis executed there.

The Death Wall

We continued through the rest of the camps and walked along the muddy roads where over a million people suffered and died. This explained more than any textbook ever could. We saw the buildings the Nazis forced the victims to build and then sleep in, four to seven people crammed into each tiny, cold, muddy, wooden space. We walked through the courtyard in which they executed countless people. Most of the buildings were well preserved, and our tour guide was marvelous in his explanations of what happened at each facility. Downstairs, in the basement of the infamous Block 11, we saw the standing prison cells the Nazis would cram four people inside all night. There were no pictures allowed and we were rushed through the sites, but that location impacted me more than any others. You can read all of the books you want, view all the images in existence, but until you stand in front of the torture chambers yourself, it will not sink in. This is why preservation of these sites is so important; they are physical proof of what happened and irreplaceable sources for historians and the public alike.