Photographer puts concentration camp into focus

ANTRIM Guardian photographer Dave Pettard has been reflecting on a sobering visit to the Auschwitz- Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.

The site has become a symbol of terror, genocide, and the Holocaust, established by Germans in 1940, in the suburbs of Oswiecim, city that was annexed to the Third Reich by the Nazis.

The camp was established when mass arrests of Poles were increasing beyond the capacity of existing ‘local’ prisons.

The first transport of Poles reached Auschwitz from Tarnów prison on June 14, 1940.

Initially, Auschwitz was to be one more concentration camp of the type that the Nazis had been setting up since the early 1930s.

But in 1942, it became the largest of the extermination centers where the the ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question - the Nazi plan to murder European Jews, was carried out.

The first and oldest was the so-called ‘main camp’ later also known as Auschwitz I, sometimes holding up to 20,000 prisoners in the buildings and grounds of prewar Polish barracks.

The second part was the Birkenau camp, which held over 90,000 prisoners in 1944, also known as Auschwitz II. This was the largest part of the complex.

The Nazis began building it in 1941 on the site of the village of Brzezinka, three kilometers from Oswiecim.

The Polish civilian population was evicted and their houses confiscated and demolished.

Mass extermination became commonplace and the majority of the victims were murdered here

More than 40 sub-camps, exploiting the prisoners as slave labourers, were founded, mainly at German industrial plants and farms, between 1942 and 1944.

The largest of them was called Buna, with ten thousand prisoners and was opened by the camp administration in 1942 on the grounds of the Buna-Werke synthetic rubber and fuel plant, six kilometers from the Auschwitz camp.

In November 1943, the Buna sub-camp became the seat of the commandant of Auschwitz III, to which other industrial Auschwitz sub-camps were subordinated.

The Germans isolated all the camps and sub-camps from the outside world and surrounded them with barbed wire fencing.

All contact with the outside world was forbidden. However, the area administered by the commandant and patrolled by the SS camp garrison went beyond the grounds enclosed by barbed wire.

It included an additional area of approximately 40 square kilometers (the so-called ‘interest zone’), which lay around the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau camps.

Other buildings were assigned to officers and non-commissioned officers from the camp SS garrison, who sometimes came here with their whole families.

The pre-war industrial facilities in the zone, taken over by Germans, were expanded in some cases and, in others, demolished to make way for new plants associated with the military requirements of the Third Reich.

The camp administration used the zone around the camp for auxiliary camp technical support, workshops, storage, offices, and barracks for the SS.

Until early 1942, the Nazis deported a relatively small number of Jews, who were sent there along with the non-Jewish prisoners, mostly Poles, who accounted for the majority of the camp population until mid-1942.

Records from the period January-December 1941 indicate that—not counting Soviet POWs—17,270 prisoners were registered in Auschwitz, of whom 1,255 were Jews.

Jewish prisoners fell victim to starvation, freezing temperatures, hard labour, constant harassment and abuse.

At least 1.1 million people including more than 200 thousand children and young people, were killed in the gas chambers immediately or soon after arrival.

These deportees included many figures from Jewish intellectual life: scholars and artists.

Through the middle of July 1942, some of the transports arriving in Auschwitz were sent directly to the gas chambers, while other Jews, classified before deportation as fit for work, were placed in the camp.

Only 20% were kept alive and placed in the camp as prisoners capable of performing slave labour. They were employed mostly in constructing new parts of the camp, or at German companies involved in maintaining and developing the military potential of the Third Reich.

By the second half of 1942, Jews made up a majority of the prisoner population. They accounted for more than half of the 400 thousand prisoners registered in Auschwitz. The majority died either while they were in Auschwitz or after transfer to other camps.

Beginning in the second half of 1941, mostly among the prisoners in the camp hospital, SS doctors began carrying out the selection of Auschwitz prisoners, during which they put to death those prisoners they regarded as unfit for work because of terminal exhaustion or sickness.

They killed these prisoners by lethal injection of phenol to the heart, or sent them to the gas chamber.

This practice was halted in the spring of 1943. Shortly afterwards, it was revived—but only for Jewish prisoners.

But help finally arrived.

Soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front opened the gates of Auschwitz Concentration Camp on January 27, 1945.

About seven thousand prisoners awaited liberation in the Main Camp, Birkenau, and Monowitz.

Before and soon after January 27, Soviet soldiers liberated about 500 prisoners in the Auschwitz sub-camps.

In the Main Camp and Birkenau, Soviet soldiers discovered the corpses of about 600 prisoners who had been shot by the withdrawing SS or who had succumbed to exhaustion.

Dave travelled to Poland last week and thought it was important to see the grim remains of the sprawling complex, which has been left standing to remind future generations of man’s inhumanity to man.

“We were picked up at 5am on a Sunday and we were at the camp for 6am,” he explained.

“There were already hundreds of people in a queue, stretching round the corner.

“There were seven of us in our party and there was no guarantee we would get tickets, which were going on sale at 9.30am.

“Anyone turning up after 10am definitely would have trouble getting in, and some people had been there at 4am.

“You can do it without a guide, or with a book, the tours are in different languages so we had to wait until 11.30am for an English tour.

“The only way to pre-book is if you do so more than three months in advance.

“It was raining really heavily, so a lot of the areas of the camp were closed off, because they were flooded.

“The piles of hair, clothes, shoes and suitcases which were removed from people when they arrived was very haunting.

“Although because I had seen so much of this in the media or on TV before, I felt almost sanitised to it.

“We were not allowed to take pictures at this point, because obviously these had belonged to, or were part of, people who were dead.

“When we got to the gas chamber and stood inside it, and saw the holes through which the gas pellets were poured, that really was horrific.

“Someone had to be up there putting the stuff in there, knowing all the people below were going to die.

“Then we walked through to the crematorium area, where piles of bodies were put in together.

“Apparently they are still finding piles of ashes out in the woods.

“We went on to Birkenau, where they still have two of the original train carriages left.

“Each carriage held 100 people and each train had 20 or 30 carriages by the time the Nazis knew they were facing defeat, they stepped up the scale of the camp and were shipping people from all over Europe and forcing them into the camp and to their deaths.

“It was very hard to witness but I would encourage anyone who has the opportunity to go, to do so.

“It was a real education. I knew that six million people died during the Holocaust and that Auschwitz- Birkenau was the biggest camp, but I did not get the enormity of it until I saw if for myself.

“Yes, you see things on documentaries but it was so shocking to see it in person.

“People were stripped of everything that they had, and if they were lucky enough not to be sent straight to the gas chambers, they were worked to death, starved or shot.

“Meanwhile the Nazis were sitting around a table in a meeting, figuring out how they could kill them quicker.

“One thing that shocked me is that there are houses all around - housing estates and big houses that would cost a million pounds over here.

“They are just overlooking the camp. I guess land is very cheap around the site, but it was hard to get your head around, it was quite odd.

“And in a place where so many people died from lack of food, when you are standing in the queue, you are offered a choice of KFC or McDonalds from down the road, and there is a kebab van too.

“It was very jarring and incongruous, but at the same time, it is good that so many people are still willing to go in there and see what happened, and that way, what happened will never be forgotten.”