Birkenau: walking through the vastness of the extermination camp

After visiting the Auschwitz I museum, I thought I had already grasped the scale of the horror that had taken place here. But that was before entering Birkenau, Auschwitz II, a vast camp that served both as a concentration camp and an extermination camp.

In this article, I'm not offering a practical guide but rather a testimony: what I saw, felt, and understood as I discovered Birkenau. If you're looking instead for concrete information to prepare your visit, you can read my practical guide to Auschwitz-Birkenau. And if you would first like to learn about the other part of the site, I have also written an account of Auschwitz I.

“Auschwitz” actually refers to a complex of several camps:

• Auschwitz I, the main camp, which today houses the museum and the exhibition blocks;
• Auschwitz II – Birkenau, the largest one, marked by the railway line, barracks, and the ruins of the crematoria;
• Auschwitz III – Monowitz and the subcamps, of which few traces remain.

Note that there was also a multitude of smaller satellite camps.

Even before passing through the entrance to Birkenau, there is a first place to see, more discreet but highly symbolic: the Judenrampe.

Before entering Birkenau: the Judenrampe

The Birkenau camp was created in the fall of 1941. Auschwitz I was no longer sufficient for the Nazis. They therefore created a second camp, in a marshy area located 3 kilometers (about 1.9 miles) from the original camp.

Today, a shuttle connects the two camps so you don't have to walk much. I chose to make the trip on foot, as a symbolic pause after the emotional weight of visiting Auschwitz I and an opportunity to have a quick lunch while walking. I wouldn't advise you to do the same, because you walk through a kind of "industrial zone" where nothing is signposted…

About 1 kilometer (about 0.6 miles) from the entrance to Birkenau is a very symbolic place, the Judenrampe.

Between spring 1942 and May 1944, this is where most of the convoys of Jews from across Europe arrived. 200,000 deported Poles, 63,000 deported French people, 58,000 deported Dutch people, 50,000 deported Greeks, 24,000 Belgians, 22,000 Germans and Austrians, 20,000 people from Bohemia-Moravia (today's Czech Republic), and so many other nationalities… Not to mention minorities and prisoners deported from other camps.

The Judenrampe amounted to a death warrant for many of them. Those who had survived the journey in sealed freight cars had to climb down, and it was there, slightly away from the Birkenau camp itself, that the Nazis carried out a "selection" that condemned 70 to 75% of those on the trains to death. Trucks were waiting nearby to take these people directly to the gas chambers, while the others were taken to the concentration camp to work.

The Judenrampe was rehabilitated at the initiative of Serge Klarsfeld (who has done a great deal of work for the remembrance of the Shoah with his wife Beate) and the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah in France.

Here, as during my visit to certain parts of the Auschwitz I camp, I was alone. A strange and sad sight, this railcar sitting in the middle of abandoned tracks, just steps away from ordinary houses where I could hear a dog barking. There are newly built houses in the area, too. The neighborhood is growing and I wondered whether one eventually gets used to seeing a concentration camp and sealed freight cars when stepping outside one's home…

From spring 1944 onward, the Nazis no longer hid… and arranged to extend the railway line all the way into Birkenau. The selection then took place inside the camp itself, as is evident today from a railcar displayed there.

The images of these selections break your heart because it feels as if the people don't know what is going to happen to them. You see these two groups forming: one with elderly people, very young children, babies in their mothers' arms… The other, made up mainly of men. We already know which group will not live and which group will have to struggle to survive.

It is time for me to leave the Judenrampe. After a ten-minute walk, I arrive at the gates of the Birkenau camp.

Entering Birkenau: a camp for which nothing prepares you

Nothing can prepare you for visiting Birkenau. You may have read hundreds of books, seen hundreds of images and documentaries; believe me, NOTHING can make you imagine what you feel once you are there.

Nothing prepares you for the immensity of this camp, so large that you can't see the end when you stand on one side, so large that it takes nearly 25 minutes to cross it along its longest side. You walk, and walk, and walk, and the barracks follow one after another, ruins after ruins, barbed wire after barbed wire…

I took this first photo near the purple dot on this map. It will give you a very small idea of the size of the camp.

Birkenau covers 170 hectares (about 420 acres). 2,340 meters by 720 meters (about 1.45 miles by 0.45 miles). And our brains are not made to grasp such things before discovering, in real life, what that actually represents: turning in circles within an endless vastness of barbed wire.

From here, you can barely make out the entrance building of the camp… and behind me lies the entire area of the KII and KIII crematoria. I took the photo at the blue dot on the map.

Birkenau means muddy, gravelly paths full of puddles, with grass and blocks on each side, built with a frightening regularity. It means 4 crematoria, 90,000 deportees surviving there simultaneously in the summer of 1944. And more than a million dead.

The women's camp: the best-preserved barracks

I began my visit to Birkenau with the women's camp, on the left of the railway line when you enter the site.

A large portion of the Birkenau barracks was destroyed, as were the camp facilities in general.

First, by the Nazis themselves, who started erasing the traces of their crimes as early as 1944 when they learned that the Soviets were no more than 200 kilometers (about 125 miles) from Auschwitz. They proceeded methodically: eliminating witnesses, having the pits containing victims' ashes covered, burning the lists of deportees who had been exterminated and incriminating documents, blowing up the crematoria (November 1944)…

Then, the wood from the barracks was largely salvaged by local residents for heating at the end of the war… and some fleeing Germans set fire to other barracks before leaving.

As a result, the only barracks still standing are those built of brick or reconstructions of wooden barracks… and often, you will see that only the brick parts remain from these barracks, that is, the chimneys.

The women's camp is the best-preserved part.

First, there is one of the buildings that once housed the kitchens.

You can walk freely among these barracks, taking as much time as you need. Visiting Birkenau is also that. No fixed route, not the same abundance of information as at Auschwitz I… and more time to think about the victims and the lessons we can draw from the Shoah.

The children's barrack

Starting in December 1942, several dozen children and their mothers were imprisoned in this block, driven out by the Nazis from the region of Zamosc and then from Warsaw. The boys from Zamosc had been separated and sent to the men's camp; most were killed by lethal injection. As for the little girls, they lived in such deplorable conditions that many succumbed to typhus or died of hunger.

Here, everything reproduces in miniature what we see for adults. The small sinks are at child height. And there are the same plank-and-brick bunks, from floor to ceiling, where the prisoners had to cram in.

The "Death Block"

In this part of the camp many medical experiments also took place, including forced sterilizations. The block where they were carried out was completely destroyed but not far away there remains a testament to the violence of the abuse inflicted on prisoners, with the "Death Block."

It was in this place, at one end of the camp, that the SS locked up women deemed unfit for work before sending them to the gas chambers. Often, they had to stay there for several days, without water and without food. When the barracks were full, the women were placed outside in the enclosed yard.

At this point in the visit, I had the rather strange feeling that my brain was no longer capable of going beyond the level of emotion it had already reached. I could walk through the Birkenau camp, read explanatory panels, photograph this or that, repeat to myself over and over that it was immense… but it was impossible to describe what I was really feeling.

It helped me better "understand" why some books by Holocaust survivors seem extremely factual. You can feel the emotion behind the facts, but there are no words to describe it. Obviously, as visitors to a concentration and extermination camp, our situation has NOTHING in common… but this feeling of an "emotional explosion to the point of complete numbness" helps you better understand how hard it is to put words to this place.

Crematoria II and III: the heart of the extermination camp

Auschwitz-Birkenau was not only a forced labor camp; it was also and above all an extermination camp where the Nazis implemented what they called the "Final Solution," the systematic elimination of the Jews.

They tested countless methods, experimenting as if it were an ordinary challenge to overcome, making clever calculations… which resulted in these four buildings: KII, KIII, KIV, and KV (KI being the crematorium at Auschwitz I).

If you visit Birkenau as part of a guided tour, you will most often see only KII and KIII.

After visiting the women's camp, I walked back up toward these buildings, which were hidden at the back of the camp behind a row of trees. As if that could prevent people from knowing what was happening there… KII and KIII were blown up by the Nazis themselves.

Diagrams help you understand how the building was laid out. Prisoners entered via the staircase you can see in the far background of the photo below and reached a changing room, of which you can see the ruins here.

They then entered the gas chamber itself. The cremation facilities were located right next door, 5 cremation furnaces per crematorium and a separate incinerator for documents found among prisoners' personal belongings.

It is between the ruins of these two crematoria (KII and KIII) that the Monument to the Victims of Auschwitz was built in 1967. Steps, a paved ground, large stones symbolizing the victims… and plaques, in many different languages:

"Let this place where the Nazis murdered one and a half million men, women and children, mostly Jews from various countries of Europe, be forever for humanity a cry of despair and a warning."

It is terrible, it moves you to tears…

But the image that has stayed with me from this monument is the plaque written in German, on which someone had placed flowers bearing the inscription "Ihr seid nicht vergessen" ("You are not forgotten"). A testament to a people who must now live with the crimes of their past, still so recent…

Today, Germany is moreover the largest donor to the Auschwitz Foundation, which collects the money needed to preserve the camps (as a visitor, you can also contribute).

The men's and family camp: walking among the ruins

The largest section of the Birkenau camp, to the right of the railway line when you enter, brought together many different categories of deportees: men, women deported from the Theresienstadt ghetto-camp, Roma families…

Here, there are barracks stretching as far as the eye can see, mostly destroyed. On one side of the camp, some of these barracks have been reconstructed to show you what was inside.

Birkenau had two types of barracks: some brick ones (in the oldest part of the camp, the women's camp) and some wooden ones (in the men's and family camp).

Of the 300 barracks that were built (including medical and administrative barracks, kitchens, and blocks used to house prisoners), today there remain 45 brick barracks and 22 wooden barracks. Preserving them is a crucial issue for the Auschwitz museum, and this is where a large part of the donations received by the Foundation is directed.

Each of these barracks could house up to 700 prisoners at a time, with 4 people sleeping on each level of a bunk like the ones you see below:

In reality, this number often climbed much higher depending on the transports arriving at Birkenau.

The blocks had a rudimentary heating system, which was completely inadequate to maintain a bearable temperature inside. A fireplace at each end of the barrack, a flue laid directly on the ground, running the entire length of the barrack, with chimneys to evacuate the smoke. You can see it in the photo above.

As for hygiene, it was not until 1944 that a few sinks were installed in each block, and you can see remnants of them in some parts of the men's camp.

For the toilets, prisoners had to go to the latrines. A basic bench with 58 holes. No privacy, a place that made it easy for all the diseases ravaging the camp to spread.

There is no word in the dictionary capable of describing this degree of dehumanization.

As soon as you move a little away from these areas where the crowds gather, you quickly find yourself in the middle of ruins, without seeing a single person anywhere around…

From Crematoria IV and V to the Sauna: the areas you see less

While I encountered a lot of people around Crematoria II and III at Auschwitz-Birkenau, there was no one when I headed toward this part of the camp, often left out of guided tours.

You suddenly emerge into a pretty little wood. Pretty, until you read the sign located there.

"Upon arrival in Auschwitz, most Jews were immediately sent to death by the SS in the gas chambers.

However, they were often forced to wait their turn in this group of trees if the gas chamber was full at the time."

In other words, this small wood served as a "waiting room for death". The crematorium is just behind it; it is impossible to imagine that the people gathered there did not anticipate what awaited them.

This is the place that was the scene of one of the greatest acts of resistance in the camp: the Sonderkommando revolt. These prisoners, employed in the gas chambers to remove the corpses - sometimes those of their own relatives - managed to blow up Crematorium IV in October 1944.

I chose to go to Auschwitz that week, 73 years later, to pay tribute to their courage. This revolt was the result of massive collaboration inside the camp: Jewish women secretly passing gunpowder from a munitions factory located in the Auschwitz camp complex, then relayed by the network of male and female resisters… to organize this explosion.

The Sonderkommando paid a heavy price, with 451 dead (often shot afterward by the SS as reprisals)… but how many lives were spared by slowing down the “death machine”? And what a message sent to the prisoners and the SS, reminding them that there are always people who fight back, even when all hope seems pointless.

Crematorium V, meanwhile, was blown up by the Nazis. A single rose had been placed there, in the middle of the ruins, beautiful and sad…

Next to each group of crematoria (KII+KIII and KIV+KV), you come upon a small pond. It is there that the Nazis dumped the ashes of the deportees killed in the gas chambers. Others were thrown into the Vistula, the river that flows through the city of Krakow.

Slightly set back, at the far end of the camp, you can see one of the largest preserved buildings in Birkenau, which was nicknamed the "Sauna". You can visit this building, though I did not take any photos there.

This is where you find the only (real) showers in the Birkenau camp (the showers in the crematoria were fake, a shameful ploy to get prisoners to walk into the building voluntarily without resisting).

The "Sauna" also contains equipment used to disinfect clothing (either with steam or hot air) to remove lice and attempt to halt the spread of epidemics. It was also here that deportees were given their prisoner uniforms.

It is just steps from the Sauna that the Nazis stored all of the belongings stolen from deportees, in a place that prisoners nicknamed "Canada" ("Kanada"), because this wealthy country seemed to them comparable to all the plundered goods piled up in these warehouses. This "Kanada" was located between the Sauna and the crematoria… a sort of intersection of shame between the goods stolen from the living and those stolen from the dead.

What you take with you when you leave Birkenau

When I left the area of Crematoria KIV and KV, I was alone. Night was beginning to fall over Birkenau. The silence was chilling, far from the area where the last groups from guided tours were wandering. Barracks, again, as far as the eye could see. Not a single living being visible for hundreds of meters around.

More than 25 minutes of walking along isolated paths to get back to the entrance to Birkenau. Suddenly, I passed a small vehicle with a man in charge of camp security. He gave me a kind, friendly smile… and I think I had never been so happy to see a living person. In the midst of death, life suddenly takes on a very particular flavor.

Then I went back to the entrance of Auschwitz-Birkenau. I looked again, one more time. The interminable railway line that I now know runs straight to the gas chambers, far off in the distance.

The watchtowers, looming over the barracks and over the 10 kilometers (about 6.2 miles) of roads that crisscross the camp.

The 16 kilometers (about 10 miles) of barbed wire that encircle the death camp's perimeter and watchtowers, again. Air raid shelters for the guards.

And the realization that I too have, in turn, become one of these "bearers of memory." I have seen, therefore I must tell. I can also, in my own small way, try to inform those who wish to make the same journey, and it is with this in mind that I wrote a dedicated article full of practical information to organize your visit to Auschwitz from Krakow.

You don't quite come back unscathed. Visiting Birkenau - and Auschwitz as a whole - affects everyone in their own way: rethinking your priorities, putting into perspective what we consider serious but really is NOT, getting involved in passing on the memory… You return with many unanswered questions, with the awareness that you know nothing at all compared to what you have seen.

Auschwitz-Birkenau also makes you cautious. If humankind could conceive such a killing machine, devise tortures of such inconceivable cruelty, persecute millions of people without anyone being able to put an end to the barbarity for many years… what protects us from it happening again?