Auschwitz - Taking me a while to write this one.

Saturday (April - 14, 2012)  Today was our trip to Auschwitz.  The bus picked us up at 10:15.  It takes about an hour and 15 minutes to get to Auschwitz from Krakaw.  During the drive they play a video that tells you about Auschwitz and what went on at the camp.  

Auschwitz before the Germans took over was an abandoned army base.  It was originally built by the Polish to assist in re-populating the area after the WWI.  The building are all built like apartments and there are formal streets between each building.  The Polish people eventually left and that is when the army took it over.  Eventually it was left empty.  

At the beginning of WWII the Germans occupied Poland and took over Auschwitz and began holding Polish citizens.  Generally individuals that were educated and influential people from the cities.  The Germans wanted them out of the way to prevent resistance.  At the entrance to the camp there is a sign which in English means "Work Will Make You Free".  Little did those that entered Auschwitz know that they would never leave and working would not bring them freedom.  

In the beginning, Auschwitz was not a dead camp, but just a Concentration Camp.  Prisoners there were made to work and were in fact worked to death.  Most prisoners lived only 2 months with few living up to a year.  

As the prisoners were marched into the camp an orchestra played.  The reason this was done was to keep them in step and it was easier to count them.

This is how the building looks today.

The prisoners were marched into the camps along the streets between the buildings and were processed.

Each prisoner was photographed and recorded like inventory.  In the beginning the Germans took three photos of each prison similar to police mugshots.  They found it to expensive and they switched to numbered tatoos on the forearm.  

The camp did have a hospital, but no one was ever cure once they entered.  If you became sick and had to enter the hospital you were subject to experiments and if the experiments didn't kill you a lethal injection of phenol would.   

Initially, phenol was injected into a victim's vein.  Before long, the technique was changed to injecting the phenol directly into the heart. It was thought that the change was made because the veins were sometimes hard to locate, but the real reason was that death was much fast and effective when administered directly into the heart. Patients injected by vein might linger for minutes or even an hour or more.  Concentrated phenol was inexpensive, easy to use, and absolutely effective when introduced into the heart so that an injection of ten to fifteen millilitres into the heart causing death within fifteen seconds.

Phenol injections were given in Block 20 and the prisoners were brought in by two Jewish prisoner assistants, sometimes two at a time and positioned on a footstool.  Usually the right arm covered the victim's eyes and the left arm was raised sideways in a horizontal position.  The idea was for the victim's chest to be thrust out so that the cardiac area was accessible for the lethal injection and to prevent the person  from being able to see what was happening.  The person giving the injection, most often was SDG Josef Klehr, filled his syringe from the bottle and then thrust the needle directly into the heart of the seated prisoner and emptied the contents of the syringe.