In 2025, most people of my baby-boom generation, like me, sons, daughters and other relatives of veterans who served during World War II 80+ years ago, associate the name Auschwitz with the terrible events (horrific crimes against humanity) that occurred there. For certain groups of people, especially Jews, Auschwitz simply stands for “evil”. A lasting symbol of the Holocaust along with other concentration/extermination camp names. And a name not to be forgotten by our generation and the subsequent ones that follow.
During an extensive trip to Poland and Germany during the fall of 2024, I visited the main Auschwitz camp complexes. The following initial 6 photos of this portfolio don’t do justice to fully showing the breadth and embedded historic evils of these complexes. Additional photos from this collection will be added at a future date. But along with many images from countless photographers who came before me and those who bear witness to these sites in the future, my photos will add to the disturbing storyline of these facilities.
The content that follows may be found to be distressing to most viewers – although no photographs or images of victims themselves are included. I bore witness…here is my experience:
The questions I am still asking myself about Auschwitz after visiting the complex on October 4, 2024 can be summed up simply: Why? Let us think about the “Whys”. Of which there are many.
So, why did I wish to visit the site of such horrific crimes? Why did Hitler hate Jews, gypsies, the mentally impaired, crippled and by extension, those not pure Aryan? Why were some, if not many, of the German people so complicit with his Final Solution? Why didn’t more of the victims rebel, much like those in the Warsaw Ghetto? Why didn’t the Allies figure out a way to rescue these people before such massive numbers were exterminated? Why?
The only answer I have for the above “why” questions relates to the first, my reason to visit: I wanted to see the extent of these camps for myself. In my opinion, reading books or articles about the Holocaust does not come close to replacing the experience of actually being at these sites. Visiting the Holocaust museum in Washington DC, and the Warsaw Rising museum in Poland’s capital prepares one somewhat for what would be seen. But one needs to actually walk thru the buildings and the grounds – and imagine being there some 80+ years before – to understand fully the scope of what happened there.
Not until you tour the actual buildings that housed these victims, see the huge amount of discarded suitcases, shoes, clothing and other artifacts – including human hair – do you start to understand the extent of this killing fanaticism of the Third Reich. When you walk the sites, building to building, especially on a downcast drizzly early October day as I did , you see for yourself the scope of these horrific factories of death – they were massive. Especially Auschwitz II, Auchwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the sites – even with many of the original buildings destroyed. This site was much larger then I had ever envisioned.
After finishing this long and depressing tour – I got back on the museum’s bus to go back to where the tour started – and I lost it. I was just overwhelmed. For a lot of reasons. Of course – for the many victims. But one of my first thoughts honestly was about my father, who I lost when I was 17 in 1971 – how much of war’s horrors did he see during his service in the US Army during the war? What effect did it have on him. Well, I am discovering that as I post this entry – thru his wartime diary and his letters back home.
One wonders how man can be so cruel on such a large scale – each victim who suffered at Auschwitz has his/her own story – the smallest of scales. I feel sorry for those who lost loved ones – so many Jews living today did, as well as the relatives of other classes of victims named above, like the Gypsies. This just can’t happen again. But I fear it can…maybe not at the same scale and not without visibility. But will the world react to stop it?
Background on the complex: Auschwitz is located in Oświęcim, Poland. The complex consisted at its peak of over 40 camps operated by the Nazis. Auschwitz I, was the main camp; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, was both a concentration and extermination camp, equipped with Zyklon B gas chambers. There were many other camps spread out near industrial sites – located so that the incarcerated could be used as slaves in the Nazi war machine’s factories. The camps became a major site of the Nazis’ Final Solution to the Jewish question along with other extermination camps such as Treblinka, Chelmno and Sobibór.
