A Holocaust picture book for 5th graders is desperately needed

American children begin their Holocaust education in the 5th grade.  Typically, a Holocaust survivor comes into a 5th grade classroom and tells the gullible children a story about how he or she escaped the gas chamber at Auschwitz, or how they survived the gas chamber selections at Auschwitz, and then escaped the gas chamber at Bergen-Belsen the day before the camp was liberated.

What is needed is a picture book so that the children can visualize a gas chamber.

A real gas chamber in Jefferson City, MO that was used for execution

A man sitting inside a real gas chamber

Holocaust revisionist Germar Rudolf inside a disinfection chamber at Auschwitz that has blue stains on the wall

Alleged gas chamber at Auschwitz has no blue Zyklon-B stains on the walls

Blue Zyklon-B stains on the outside wall of an Auschwitz-Birkenau disinfection building

Inside the ruins of a gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau that has no  heavy blue stains from Zyklon-B use

Inside of Auschwitz-Birkenau alleged gas chamber shows no heavy Zyklon-B stains

The 5th grade students should be told that men risked a long prison sentence to go inside the ruins of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau to take samples from the walls and test these samples to show that there was no evidence that Zyklon-B had been used in these alleged gas chambers to kill millions of Jews.

Gas chamber expert Fred Leuchter climbed down into alleged gas chamber at Birkenau and found no evidence of gassing

After the children have been prepared, by looking at a picture book of the alleged Auschwitz gas chambers, they can then make up their minds about the truth of the stories told by the survivors.  At least, the children should be prepared to ask intelligent questions of the survivors who claim that they escaped the Auschwitz gas chamber.

Another revisionist who climbed down into the alleged gas chamber in Krema II at Birkenau

You can read a typical story here of a Holocaust survivor, who survived, while millions of others were sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. She recently spoke to High School students in Wichita, Kansas who gave her a standing ovation, but apparently asked no questions.  This quote is from her story:

One by one, and in groups, so many other children she knew in the Terezin [Theresienstadt] camp got sent off to the gas chambers, to places like Auschwitz.

Why didn’t one of the students ask her why the Nazis left witnesses behind at Theresienstadt, including young children who would live to be 82 years old, and tell the world about the Auschwitz gas chambers 68 years later?

January 27, 2013 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day

January 27, 2013 is the 68th anniversary of the official liberation of the three Auschwitz camps by the Soviet Union on January 27, 1945.  The German SS men, who ran the camp, had left on January 18, 1945, taking 60,000 prisoners with them on a “death march” out of the camp.

You can read all about Holocaust Remembrance Day here on a website, which includes a video about the Auschwitz Album, a book of photos that gives “visual evidence” of the mass murder at Auschwitz.

Still shot from a movie taken by the Soviets after Auschwitz was liberated

I previously blogged about International Holocaust Remembrance Day here and here.

Artwork at the entrance to the Auschwitz Museum

The photo above was taken by me in 2005. The green arrow in the photo points to the exit door from the Auschwitz administration building.  The next thing that visitors see is the iconic sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” over the entrance to the Auschwitz I main camp.

Two tourists entering the Auschwitz main camp in 1998

Last year, a new record was set for the number of visitors to Auschwitz: over 1.4 million people visited the camp.  In 1998, when I first visited the Auschwitz complex, there were only a few visitors to the main camp. No one, besides me and my tour guide, was there when I toured the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp in 1998.  (Raul Hilberg wrote a three-volume set of books entitled “The Destruction of the European Jews” after touring only the main Auschwitz camp for half a day; he did not see the Birkenau camp where the Jews were gassed.)

Recent photo of visitors leaving the Auschwitz main camp which is now a Museum

Children marching out of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp after they were liberated by the Soviet Union on Jan. 27, 1945

The ruins of Krema III, one of the four gas chamber buildings at Auschwitz-Birkenau, are shown in the photo below.

Ruins of Krema III gas chamber building which was blown up on Jan. 20, 1945

There were 611 children in the Birkenau camp who stayed behind when the camp was evacuated on January 18, 1945. There were 4,428 women and girls and 169 boys who stayed behind when the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex was evacuated. Around 2,000 prisoners were left behind in the men’s camp at Birkenau; there were around 1250 men in the main camp who did not join the march out of the camp and 850 men who chose to stay behind at Monowitz.

According to Holocaust historian Danuta Czech, the evacuation of the three camps began in the early morning hours of January 18, 1945 when 500 women with children were escorted out of the Birkenau camp by SS guards. They reached Wodzislaw on January 21st. The men arrived the next day and all men, women and children were loaded onto open box cars and taken to Germany.

The prisoners at the Auschwitz III camp (Monowitz) and all the prisoners in the Auschwitz sub-camps marched to the four concentration camps at Gleiwitz near the German border, arriving on January 21st. They were then taken on trains to Buchenwald, Dachau, Sachsenhausen or Mauthausen.

Women who stayed behind when Auschwitz was evacuated on Jan. 18, 1945

Photo from Auschwitz Album shows Jews waiting for the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The Hungarian Jews, shown in the photo above, are looking toward the Sauna building, across the road from the warehouse buildings, where there was a shower room.  But there was no shower for them; this photo is “visual evidence” that these Jews are waiting for the gas chamber in Krema IV.

Child survivors leaving the barracks at Birkenau after the camp was liberated

Each of the survivors in the photo above has a story to tell about how they beat the odds and were not chosen by Dr. Death (Dr. Josef Mengle) for the gas chamber.

the Boxcar has become an icon of the Holocaust

Boxcar on display at Auschwitz-Birkenau

My 2005 photo of a Boxcar at Judenrampe near Auschwitz-Birkenau

Boxcar at Neuengamme Memorial Site   Photo Credit: Bonnie M. Harris

Jews being loaded into a boxcar to be transported to the Belzec “extermination camp.”

This quote is from Rainer Froebe, University of Hannover: <Rainer.Froebe @mbox.hist-sem.uni-hannover.de>:

The German railway box car (Gueterwagen) is widely used as an icon for the
deportation of Jews and Gypsies.  Full size box cars are on display at
memorial sites in Berlin, Neuengamme, Nordhausen (Dora-Mittelbau
concentration camp), Les Milles (France), Yad Vashem, Washington, D. C. (US
Holocaust Memorial Museum), and Dallas, Texas.
Which other museums or memorial sites (worldwide) have a similar exhibit?
The *Deutsche Technikmuseum* (German Technical Museum) in Berlin which has
been the first institution to put a box car on display in October 1988 is
preparing an iconographic survey.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC has a German boxcar on display; you can read about it and see a photo of the interior of the boxcar here.

German boxcar that was lifted by a crane into an American Holocaust Museum

The photo immediately above shows a boxcar that was recently brought from Germany and lifted by a crane into a Holocaust Museum in Farmington Hills, MA.  After the boxcar was in place, the unfinished Museum was built around it.  You can read all about it here.  This quote is from another article about the Holocaust Museum in Farmington Hills:

The morning after Henrietta and Rachel’s family had their first Passover seder in the Warsaw Ghetto, Nazi soldiers came, gathered hundreds of Jews and put them into a railroad boxcar headed for the concentration camps.

It took the sisters and their family: Sara, mother; Israel, father; and two brothers, Reuben and Herschel, one week to reach Majdanek, an extermination camp near Lublin, Poland.

When the train finally reached its destination, Nazi soldiers made their selections. The men and women were separated. They never again saw their father or brothers. Their mother was pulled out of the group of women. Rachel and Henrietta last saw her waiting in a grassy area. “Little did we know that she would be put in the gas chamber,” Rachel Schwartz said. “Never did we think we would never see her again.”

Gallery dedication

The sisters, Rachel Schwartz and Henrietta Weisberg, told their story at the Nov. 20 dedication of The Henrietta and Alvin Weisberg Gallery at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills.

It’s been 70 years since Henrietta and Rachel were transported to an “extermination camp.”  How old was Henrietta when her mother was sent to the gas chamber at Majdanek?

I did a search and found that Henrietta is now 83, so she was 13 at the time that she arrived at the Majdanek “extermination camp” but was not selected for the gas chamber.  How did this happen?  As everyone knows, Jews younger than 15 and older than 45 were immediately gassed, hours after their arrival at an “extermination camp.”

Dead German soldiers on a train at Dachau

The photo above shows German soldiers who were taken to a boxcar, parked outside the Dachau concentration camp, and shot after they surrendered the camp to the American liberators of Dachau.  This boxcar had brought prisoners from the Buchenwald camp to Dachau in the last days of World War II.

During World War II, German civilians and German soldiers were routinely riding in boxcars.  During the Depression in America, hobos were “riding the rails,” going from town to town, trying to find a job.  No one makes a big deal about this.  The railroad Museum in Sacramento, CA has an American boxcar on display, which is shown in the photo below.

Boxcar on display in Sacramento railroad museum

8th grade student and 82-year-old Holocaust survivor share stories in Toronto

Mother and baby are directed to Krema II gas chamber on the other side of an incoming train at Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp

Sally Rosen is an 82-year-old survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Joshua is a student in a middle school in Toronto. They shared Holocaust survival stories when Ms. Rosen recently gave a talk at Joshua’s school.

According to her story, Ms. Rosen was 14 when she arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on a train in 1944. It is well known that everyone under the age of 15 was destined for the gas chamber, but Ms. Rosen was saved when Dr. Josef Mengele looked away for a moment, and she was able to join the saved line and also shove her mother into the saved line.

How did Ms. Rosen know about the two lines at Birkenau?  Note the prisoner, wearing striped “pajamas,” on the left side of the photo above.  The Nazis had the courtesy to post prisoners, who were Kapos, at the selections; the Kapos informed the incoming prisoners on methods of survival.

In the photo below, new arrivals at Auschwitz-Birkenau are shown in two lines, one line for men and another line for women and children.  Dr. Mengele is shown at the head of the line of men, holding a cigarette at chest height, totally unconcerned that some of the Jews might try to sneak into a different line.

Dr. Mengele turns his back on two columns of prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau

This quote is from an article, about the talk that Ms. Rosen gave to middle school students in Toronto, which you can read in full in the Canadian National Post here:

New arrivals were broken into four lines and inspected by Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor. They were divided into two groups. One lived. One died.

“Mengele looked at me and I looked down,” Ms. Rosen says. “You couldn’t look him in the eye. And then God said — ‘I shall make you a miracle’ — and Mengele, in that moment, he looked away, and so I pushed my mother into the [group that lived].”

Note that Ms. Rosen did not refer to Dr. Mengele as Doctor, although he had two degrees:  A Doctor of Medicine and a PhD in Anthropology.  Most Holocaust survivors are alive today because Dr. Mengele made some kind of mistake. Yet, he gets no respect.

Where are the photos of the alleged four lines and two groups, one group that was intended to live and one group was intended to die?  Of course, the Nazis didn’t photograph that.  The photo below shows a line of men and a line of women; two women have just been sent to the left of the incoming train.  This road led to Krema III, Krema IV and Krema V, but it also led to the Sauna where incoming prisoners took a shower.  (Part of this road is now covered by the International Monument.)

Two women at Auschwitz-Birkenau are sent to the SS man’s left

As you are facing the end of the tracks into the Birkenau camp, with your back to the “Gate of Death,” Krema II is on the left, as shown in the photo below.  Krema III, Krema IV, Krema V and the Sauna are on the other side of the tracks.

Krema II is on the left side of an incoming train at Birkenau

This quote is from the article about Ms. Rosen’s talk to the students:

She [Rosen] remembers the sign on the camp gates: “Work will set you free.” She remembers a terrible stench. Death. It is a smell that has followed her through the years, a sensory memory she can’t shake.

The photo below accompanies the article about Ms. Rosen’s talk to the students.

Gate into the Auschwitz main camp; Sally Rosen was sent to the Auschwitz II camp, aka Birkenau

Photo Credit:  REUTERS /Kacper Pempel

How could Sally Rosen have seen the Arbeit Macht Frei gate at the Auschwitz I camp, as she told the students?  Did the train from the Lodz ghetto arrive first at the main camp, where she was marched though the gate under the iconic sign? No, the train tracks didn’t go to the main camp.

I previously blogged about the meaning of the Arbeit Macht Frei sign here.

In her talk, Ms. Rosen made a big fuss about Holocaust deniers telling lies.  The quote below is from the article:

Ms. Rosen grew tired of people forgetting about a decade ago, tired of people telling lies. She couldn’t stand the stories she would see bubble up in the media about an Ernst Zundel, the German-Canadian hate-monger, or a David Irving, the so-called British historian, or a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the erratic Iranian president, spouting off about the Holocaust.

So Ms. Rosen decided to tell a few lies herself?

What about Joshua, the 8th grade student, who wanted to tell his story to her?  This quote is from the article:

Joshua’s Zadie, or was it his Bubby, [grandfather or grandmother] survived the Holocaust, just like Ms. Rosen did. On the way to Auschwitz they fell deathly ill and were thrown off the train so that the other unwitting concentration-camp-bound passengers wouldn’t contract whatever it was they had. They were left for dead. And yet, somehow, they lived.

Who threw grandpa (or was it grandma) off the train?  The Nazis or the other passengers?  The Nazis would not have cared if all the passengers on a train to a death camp contracted a disease and died.  This would have saved them the cost of the Zyklon-B gas pellets needed to gas the sick prisoners when the train arrived.  The passengers could not have unlocked the doors on the train, because if this had been possible, they would all have jumped off the train.

Prisoners in the Lodz ghetto were among the last of the Jews to be sent to Auschwitz.  This quote is from this website:

On June 10, 1944, Heinrich Himmler ordered the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto. The Nazis told Rumkowski who then told the residents that workers were needed in Germany to repair damage caused by Allied air raids. The first transport left on June 23, with many others following until July 15. On July 15, 1944 the transports halted. The decision had been made to liquidate Chelmno because Soviet troops were getting close. Unfortunately, this only created a two week hiatus, for the remaining transports would be sent to Auschwitz.

On August 4, 1944, a final liquidation transport of 74,000 Jews from Lodz was sent out from the ghetto on its way to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Though a few remaining workers were retained by the Nazis to finish confiscating materials and valuables out of the ghetto, everyone else living in the ghetto had been deported. Even Rumkowski and his family were included in these last transports to Auschwitz.

Five months later, on January 19, 1945, the Soviets liberated the Lodz ghetto.

How much did each Holocaust survivor weigh at the time of liberation?

Every Holocaust survivor seems to know exactly how much he or she weighed when they were liberated.  I got to thinking about this today when I read about yet another Auschwitz survivor who mentioned how much he weighed when he was liberated.  (Average weight for the survivors was around 60 pounds.)

Did the liberators bring scales with them, so that each person could weigh himself?  No, but they did bring cameras with them and the liberation photos show that many of the prisoners were in good health; for example, the women in the photo below, taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  (Why wasn’t the old woman sent to the gas chamber immediately upon arrival?)  Notice the nice clothes worn by the young girl in the photo.

Survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau

Photos taken on the day of liberation, at all the camps, show that not all prisoners in the concentration camps were skin and bones, even after many years in the camp.

The photo below was taken on the day that one of the sub-camps of Dachau was liberated by soldiers in the 45th Division of the American Army.

Russian POWs in a Dachau sub-camp

Notice that the American Army officer on the left looks slimmer than the Russian POWs.

There are many photos of skinny Russian POWs who were allegedly starved at Mauthausen, as shown in the photo below.

Russian POWs at Mauthausen

When I visited the Mauthausen Memorial Site, I saw a scale model of the quarry there, which is shown in the photo below.

Scale model of Mauthausen quarry

On the right, at the top of the photo above, you can see the barracks for the sick inmates at Mauthausen, also known as the “Russian camp” because this section of the camp was first used to house  Soviet POWs. This area is now a graveyard for the sick prisoners who died after the camp was liberated.

Were the men, in the old black and white photo, actually prisoners in the Mauthusen “sick camp”? Were they skin and bones because they were ill?  Or were they “Russian POWs” who had been deliberately starved?

It would be natural to assume that the Russian POWs were treated the worst in the Nazi camps because the Russians were treating German POWs very badly.  But the old photo taken in a Dachau sub-camp shows that at least some of the Russian POWs were treated very well.

the Nazis “had more people than they could kill” at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The title of my blog post today comes from a quote by a British student who recently visited Auschwitz-Birkenau on a “Lessons From Auschwitz” trip organized by the Holocaust Educational Trust.

“The scale of the killings [at Auschwitz-Birkenau] was enormous.

“What shocked me was that they actually had more people here than they could kill. Thank God people survived and there was evidence so people could be brought to justice and tell the story, so something like this will never happen again.”

This student got it right:  Thank God that there were too many to kill, so there were people who survived and could “tell the story.”

One would think that gas chambers would be an efficient way to kill millions of people.  But no! In the inefficient killing system at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the undressing rooms were larger than the gas chamber rooms; it should have been the other way around.  Not all of the naked people in the undressing room could get into the gas chamber.  Yesterday, I blogged about Irene Zisblatt who got stuck in the door of the gas chamber because there were too many people in the undressing room, so that not everyone could get into the gas chamber.  With the best engineers in the world, the Germans could not figure this out in advance!

Blueprint of Krema II, one of the four gas chamber buildings at Birkenau

On the blueprint shown above, the undressing room is on the right. The gas chamber is perpendicular to the undressing room. Notice that the undressing room is three times the size of the gas chamber.  There is an exterior entrance on the north side of the building which opens into a Vorraum (vestibule) so that the SS men could enter the gas chamber, without going through the undressing room. In case of emergency, the gas chamber could be used as a bomb shelter for the SS men working in the area, since it had a gas-tight air raid shelter door.

But there were other ways to kill the Jews at Auschwitz, besides the gas chamber. Why didn’t the Nazis just start shooting the Jews at the end, when they finally realized that they were not going to be able to finish the job?  But no!  The stupid Nazis marched the survivors out of the camp before the Soviet liberators arrived.  Their plan was to march the Jews to death, but it didn’t work.  There were survivors of the “death march” who lived to tell their stories, even to this day.

After fooling the prisoners into thinking that they were going to be saved by marching out of the camp, the Jews were put on a train as soon as they got to the German border.  They could have killed them all by continuing the “death march” until everyone had died.

This quote is also from the article which you can read in full here:

Visiting the main camp, one is struck by the systemic nature of this genocide and the efficiency with which the Nazis carried out their “project”. Not only did they ruthlessly exploit the labour of those they did not kill immediately, but also they looted the belongings the prisoners brought with them, ripped out gold teeth from victims of the gas chamber and shaved off their hair for textile production. A huge pile of this hair is on display in the camp, a sight that brings some pupils to tears.

Wrong, wrong, wrong!  The Nazis were most certainly NOT efficient in their “project.”  Having a labor camp and an extermination camp in the same location was not efficient.  The three Operation Reinhard camps (Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor) were efficient; you don’t hear many survivors of these camps out on the lecture circuit telling about how they survived.

Ripping gold teeth out of the mouths of the corpses was NOT efficient.  They should have removed the gold teeth before sending the Jews to the gas chamber.  The hair should have been shaved BEFORE sending the Jews to the gas chamber, so that it would not have had to be cleaned.  Just think of the mess that was created by people dying while crammed together in a gas chamber that was too small.

This quote is from the article about the student trip:

Our final destination before flying back to London is Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, located just two miles away from the main camp. Birkenau was designated by SS leader Heinrich Himmler as the place of the “final solution of the Jewish question in Europe” – the main site where trains delivered people to the gas chambers from all over German occupied Europe between 1942 and 1944.

Do you see the problem here?  The Nazis waited until 1942 to begin a genocide!  And they stopped in November 1944 when the ovens were removed from the crematoria at Birkenau.

So now you know why there are so many Holocaust survivors.  They simply “had more people than they could kill” at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It would have been more efficient to have had many small gas chambers at many small camps where the Jews could have been killed locally, instead of having a 425 acre site at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Jews could get lost in the 300 barrack buildings, never be seen again by their family members.

“stuck in the door of the gas chamber” How Irene Zisblatt survived Auschwitz-Birkenau

Irene Zisblatt was 13 years old, 4 feet tall and weighed 60 pounds when she got stuck in the door of the Krema III gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

During a routine roll call, Irene was confronted by Dr. Josef Mengele who asked her:  “Was machst du da?”  She should have been sent to the gas chamber long ago because she was only 13 and everyone under the age of 15 was gassed immediately.

A photo of the Krema III gas chamber building is shown below.  Note the 10 ft. high barbed wire fence around the building.  Right next to the fence is a convenient railroad track where a gondola railroad car was parked on the day that Irene was sent to the gas chamber by that evil monster Dr. Josef Mengele.  Irene was all alone, and the gas chamber was already full.  She tried to squeeze into the gas chamber, but she got stuck in the door.  But not to worry.  An SS man pulled her out of the doorway.  Then a young Sonderkommando came to save her; he wrapped her up in a blanket and tossed her over the 10 ft. high fence, into a gondola car that was parked outside the gas chamber building.

Krema III building surrounded by 10 ft. high fence

According to this quote from another blog which you can read here:

…the young man must have been an athletics champion, as the distance between the railroad tracks and the fence around crematorium III was over 100 ft., the fence had a height of about 10 ft., and Chana weighed about sixty pounds.[71] Fifth, if there had been a train with open cars[72] waiting with prisoners near the crematoria, it would have been guarded by SS personnel who doubtlessly would have noticed the unconventional arrival of Chana by “air lift.” And last not least, she would have been noticed at the latest at roll call on arrival, because her name would not have appeared in the transport list.

Gondola cars on the “death train” at Dachau

A gondola car is a railroad car that is open on top; it is used primarily to haul coal or similar items, not passengers.  The photo below shows a railroad car of the type that was used to transport passengers to Auschwitz.

Railroad car on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Irene Zisblatt recorded her story of how she escaped from the gas chamber and you can hear her tell it on a YouTube video.  Don’t try to deny her story or you might wind up in prison for 5 years in 17 different countries.

The ruins at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1979, compared to today

An article in the online Telegraph, which you can read here, includes a photo that allegedly shows the ruins of one of the gas chambers at Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau.  It is an old black and white photo, taken in 1979.  I enhanced the photo, using Photoshop and reproduced it below.

Here is the caption on the photo, copied from the Telegraph:

FILE – In this undated file photo from 1979, a former inmate of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland sometime in 1979, gazes down at ruins of gas chambers where hundreds of people were exterminated during World War II. The oldest known survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, a teacher who gave lessons in defiance of his native Poland’s Nazi occupiers has died at the age of 108, an official said Monday, Oct. 22, 2012. Antoni Dobrowolski died Sunday in the northwestern Polish town of Debno, according to Jaroslaw Mensfelt, a spokesman at the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.

1979 photo of an Auschwitz survivor viewing the ruins at Auschwitz-Birkenau

My 2005 photo of the ruins of the undressing room in Krema II

In the color photo above, note the steps of the International Monument on the right hand side. Note the guard tower in the background on the right.  My 2005 photo matches the 1979 black and white photo above, indicating that the man is not looking at the ruins of a gas chamber, but at the ruins of the undressing room of Krema II.

Another 2005 photo of the undressing room of Krema II

Again, note the guard tower and the steps of the International Monument on the right in the photo above. In the foreground, you can some of the ruins of the oven room, which was at ground level.  The undressing room was 5 feet underground.

The ruins of the Krema II gas chamber

My 2005 photo of the ruins of the Krema II gas chamber shows the International Monument in the background, slightly to the left.

Now look at the old black and white photo again.  It appears that some reconstruction of the ruins was done between 1979 and 2005.  Also, look at the background of the photo.  It looks like wide open countryside, with no trees hiding the view of the Jews walking into the undressing room.  Shouldn’t there have been a fence or a row of trees to hide the “mass murder” that was going on in the camp?

My 2005 photo of the ruins of the undressing room in Krema II

My 2005 photo above shows that the undressing room has been reconstructed, and a row of trees has been planted to hide the prisoners entering the undressing room from onlookers outside the camp.  The path, that the prisoners walked, up to the undressing room entrance should also have been reconstructed.

I am not convinced that there was an entrance to the undressing room in this location. A model of Krema II and the blueprint for the Krema II building are shown below.

Model of Krema II gas chamber building

In the photo above, notice that there is a door into the gas chamber building shown on the wall of the building on the left side. There was an exterior entrance with a staircase on the north side of the Krema II building, which led to the Vorraum of Krema II so that the SS men could enter Leichenkeller 1, the gas chamber, without going through Leichenkeller 2, which was the undressing room. In case of emergency, the gas chamber could be used as a bomb shelter for the SS men working in the area, since it had a gas-tight air raid shelter door.

Blueprint of the Krema II building

On the blueprint shown in the photo above, the undressing room is on the right hand side. To the left of the undressing room is the above-ground oven room with the ovens designated by 5 squares. There were 5 ovens with 3 openings in each oven. The gas chamber was perpendicular to the undressing room. On the blueprint, the gas chamber is labeled L-keller which is an abbreviation for Leichenkeller, which means corpse cellar in English. The undressing room was also called a Leichenkeller on the blueprint. Note that the length of the undressing room is two or three times as long as the length of the gas chamber.

Now that we see that there was a way to get into the undressing room without going around the building to enter from the end of the room, why didn’t the prisoners enter the undressing room through the door into the Vorraum?

Was the undressing room reconstructed to show an entrance down some steps that weren’t actually there before the reconstruction?

Update, 5:22 p.m.

A reader has alerted me to the website of The Daily Mail which shows a photo Wilhelm Brasse standing beside the ruins of the undressing room in Krema II at Auschwitz in 1979.  In The Daily Mail photo, it looks like there are steps at the far end of the undressing room.  However, when I converted the photo to 300 dpi, from the 63 dpi in the original, it looks more like a brick wall.  I did not enhance the photo in any way.

High resolution photo of the ruins of the undressing room (Click on the photo to enlarge)

The photographer who took this photo in 1979 focused on Brasse in the foreground of the picture. The background, which shows the end of the undressing room, is not in sharp focus, so it is hard to tell if there are really steps in the photo.

The Auschwitz gas chambers — there are two sides to every story

The gas chamber in Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau is nothing but ruins now.  It was blown up by the Nazis, or by the Soviet liberators of Auschwitz, depending on what you believe.  There are two sides to the story.

Ruins of Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Ruins of the oven room in Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Original blueprint for Krema II building

There are two well-known videos which tell two sides of the story of the gas chamber in Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Watch the two videos and decide for yourself which is true.

What it’s like to visit Auschwitz today…some tourists are sent to the left

It’s been 7 years since my last visit to Auschwitz. How time flies!  There have been some changes since I last visited.  When I was there 7 years ago, it was not forbidden to take photos, AFAIK.  I walked around the Auschwitz main camp and the Auschwitz II camp (Birkenau) for several days, carrying two cameras, and no one said a word to me about not taking photos.  That has changed, according to a story told by recent visitors, which you can read here.

This quote is from the website cited above:

It was, appropriately, a gloomy and cold morning when we arrived at the camp and hundreds of people from around the world were gathering outside the entrance.

On leaving our minibus, members of our tour party were given yellow labels to identify that we were with an English-speaking group. Other visitors with the same tour company, who were presumably non-English-speaking, were sporting blue labels.

I found it bitterly ironic that on arrival at the camp entrance those visitors with blue labels were told to go to the left and those with yellow labels to the right.

More than 50 years earlier, arrivals at Auschwitz were similarly divided: healthy prisoners to the left; women, children and the sick to the right – the latter being immediately destined for the gas chambers and the crematoriums, usually the same day.

What a revolting development this is!  Non-English speaking visitors are now sent to the left and English speakers to the right. If I remember correctly, after entering the main camp through the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, the path to the left leads to the gas chamber.  How insensitive to make visitors go to the left to the gas chamber!

Auschwitz survivors leave through Arbeit Macht Frei gate, January 2009
Photo Credit: REUTERS

After entering through the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, shown in the photo above, the first building on the left is Block 24, which was the brothel when the camp was in operation years ago. To get to the gas chamber in the main camp,  turn to the left just after entering through the Arbeit Macht Frei gate. Go to the end of the street and then turn right. You will soon see an opening in the fence (shown in the photo below) that leads to the gas chamber building, which is located outside the camp.

Path that leads to the gas chamber which is outside the camp

If you turn to the right at the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, you will pass the camp kitchen. The photo below shows a view of the camp kitchen. The thing on the left of the birch tree, in the center of the photo, is a one-man air raid shelter. The Allies targeted Auschwitz for bombing because of the important munitions factories there, which used prison labor.  Those who were selected to go to the right were the lucky ones who were allowed to live.

Camp kitchen is to the right of the Arbeit Macht Frei gate

The photo below shows the entrance to the main Auschwitz camp, just before you get to the Arbeit Macht Frei gate. In this photo, the road going straight ahead is the road to the gas chamber.  The tour groups should be divided at this point, so that no one has to be waved to the left and then find out that they have been taken to the gas chamber.  In the photo below, the road to the right goes through the Arbeit Macht Frei gate.

My 1998 photo shows the entrance street into the main camp

1998 photo of the exit from the camp. The Arbeit sign is out of sight on the left side of the photo

This quote is from the article which you can read in full here:

Although Auschwitz’s main buildings are not particularly gruesome, the same cannot not be said for nearby Auschwitz II-Birkenau, which is instantly recognisable (sic) for what it was: a death camp.

By the time we arrived at the purpose-built extermination centre that is Birkenau there was a bitterly cold wind blowing and rain was lashing the bleak site. Most of the wooden barracks that once housed the many thousands of prisoners were demolished by the SS in a bid to erase all traces of their crimes. Likewise the gas chambers capable of killing 2000 people a day were blown up, but the ruins still remain and enough of the camp survives to give visitors an all-too-recognisable (sic) insight into the evil that was perpetrated here.

At my first sight of the Birkenau camp in 1998, from the top of the gate house tower, I instantly recognized it as NOT a “death camp.”  The camp is 425 acres in size.  Why would a “death camp” be that big?  Why were hundreds of barrack buildings necessary if people were brought to the Birkenau camp and killed on the day that they arrived?