Back in the days when we used to travel, I loved writing about places we visited, especially about restaurants. It was my way of journaling. Actually, it was my way of remembering where we had been. It was my own little travel guide. Move over Rick Steves. And Frommer's. And Lonely Planet. And Fodor's.
It's been a heck of a long time since I've been outside the city limits of Grand Junction. But, I still have that urge to share a dining experience. To list my favorites on the menu. Or describe the ambience of a quiet table for two tucked away in the corner by the fireplace.
In order to go out for dinner requires one to change out of either day PJs or night PJs and put on 'hard clothes.' That's what my daughters and I have now started calling real clothes. You know. Those clothes without elastic in the waist band. The ones that actually touch your body.
HansMan and I had a date night last week, and I climbed into some 'hard clothes.' We went to Devil's Kitchen which is the restaurant on the fourth floor of the Hotel Maverick. We love that place.
I suggest checking out their menu and going there for lunch or dinner.
Because of COVID, they have installed 'igloos' on the outer deck. They are heated and warm blankets are provided. Even though it was a bit chilly, we didn't need the blankets. Each igloo has its own special lighting and the view is spectacular looking across the city to The Colorado National Monument.
We’ve have done our share of traveling in the past, but not so much since COVID hit. I've not been on a plane since sometime last year.
I'm not that upset about it because air travel had gotten to be a pain, but for some reason, I've been thinking about all those times in all those airports.
Having been witness to and a part of the chaotic boarding process, I've thought back to this experience that I really don't miss that much.
If you have ever gotten on board a plane, sat in an aisle seat, then had to get up not once but twice to let the passengers who have the middle and window seats sit down, you may have an inkling what I rambling ranting about. Or been knocked in the head because someone dropped a carryon while trying to cram it in the overhead bin above you. Or stood behind some moron who’s blocking the aisle, because he forgot his book that’s in his carry on that he dropped on your head that he’s placed in the overhead compartment, well, perhaps you understand.
Just once, I would like to be the one in charge of the boarding process. Give me that microphone.
It would go something like this:
We are ready to board Flight 01234 to Whatchamacallitville.
We’ll start with our military personnel (thank you for your service to our country), those needing extra help boarding, those with children (who will inevitably be seated behind me and will kick the back of my seat the entire flight), and first class ticket holders. (*Insert any others who need early boarding here.*)
While those passengers are boarding, the rest of you, please sit down and please listen. Did you hear me? I said SIT DOWN and LISTEN.
Find your boarding pass NOW. Not, when you get to check-in. Also, if there is something in your carry on that you need and you plan to put in the overhead compartment, get it out NOW. Not when you are standing in the aisle rifling through it looking for your earbuds while holding up everyone else who’s waiting to board.
The flight attendants have been equipped with cattle prods and have been trained in how to use them.
Look at your boarding pass. Find the word ZONE. Whatever number is there, disregard it. (Whoever thought up this process is an idiot to think that it works efficiently.)
Look for your seat number and letter. The number designates which row you are in. The letter designates which seat you are in.
If your number is between 40 and 50, I’m talking to you. Please PAY ATTENTION !
Now, look at your letter. It will either be an A, B, C, D, E, or F . The amount of letters is determined by the kind of plane. In this case, today we have a plane with three seats on each side of the aisle.
This is our Arm Rest Rule. Abide by it at all times while seated: Window seat gets right arm rest. Aisle seat gets left arm rest. Middle seat gets both on either side. Or vice versa depending which side of the plane you’re on. At any rate, the middle person gets BOTH arm rests. It’s the least those on either side can do to make the middle guy a bit more comfortable.
Plus, there will be NO reclining your seat backs. The buttons have been super-glued and are inoperable.
If your letter is an A (window seat) or F (window seat), and if your number is between 40 and 50, please stand up with your ticket in your hand and anything that was in that carryon that you were going to put in the overhead, and approach the gate.
In other words, we are boarding all the window seats at the back of the plane FIRST. While these passengers are boarding, everyone whose ticket numbers are between 30 and 40, with the letters A or F, do the same.
By now, some of you have figured out what we’re doing. The rest of you, morons passengers continue to please listen.
20 – 30 Letters A & F, please line up.
Anyone else whose numbers are less than 20, with the letters A and F, get in line behind them.
NOW, we’ll start again with seats 40 through 50. If your letters are B & E (middle seats), please make your way to the boarding door.
30 – 40 B & E
20 – 30 B & E
Less than 20 B & E
At this point, we have the window seats occupied, and are now filling up the middle seats.
Hopefully, by now, the rest of you have caught on.
40 - 50 C & D. Line up.
30 - 40 C & D. Line up.
20 - 30 C & D. Line up.
Numbers less than 20 C & D. Line up.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen.
Oh, wait.
The waiting area is empty.
Anyone who has lined up 97 kids to go to the cafeteria, or load buses, or tried seating them in an auditorium totally understand the above process. Maybe the airlines should consider letting school teachers be in charge of the boarding process. You can bet your bottom dollar it would be much less confusing for all concerned.
Sitting in the Union Train Station in Denver, waiting on Amtrak to take me home, provided me ample time to people watch. Every socio-economic level is represented on the money- spectrum in that building. From those who enter with all their belongings on their backs to find shelter from the winter elements, to those decked out in the most expensive coats and boots and jewels money can buy.
I chose my seat carefully. Across from a beautiful white Pit Bull/Boxer mix. She was lying on someone’s coat on the floor. She was being petted by a young man who met the description of a person in the first half of the aforementioned sentence.
I watched him gingerly rub her ears, her eyes her neck, her tummy, her legs, and her paws. She responded with a gentle thump of her tail and looked up at him with big brown loving eyes. It was apparent they were connecting with each other on that level of unconditional love that fur babies lift us humans up to with no words involved.
His eyes met mine, and I said that he had a beautiful dog. He just shook his head no, then pointed to the lady in the next chair. I then noticed the leash tethering her to the dog.
She was dressed in a hippie-chic style. More hippie than chic. I liked it. She was more than happy to explain that ‘Baby’ did not like sleeping on cold floors. And that it was her coat she was lying on to keep her happy. All this time, the young man continued to love Baby. And Baby reciprocated. I could almost feel a positive, warm energy wafting across to me as Baby nudged the young man each time he stopped petting her. There was a soft smile on his face that grew into a large grin with each nudge.
I looked down to locate my train ticket buried deep inside my purse, and when I looked up, the young man had quietly disappeared.
I never saw him again. Dressed in his tattered clothes with a disheveled ponytail atop his head and a scruffy three-day old beard. He was just gone. He never spoke a word, but the conversation he had with Baby didn’t need any words. I wondered how long it had been since some human had hugged him. Had told him he was a good person and was loved. I guess maybe Baby had done that.
I will never see Baby and her human again.
As I sit on this train thinking about those fleeting ten minutes, I wonder why that experience made such an impact on me, so much so that I wanted to share it.
A quote from Claude Monet comes to mind… ”You have to know how to seize just the right moment in a landscape instantaneously because that particular moment will never come again, and you’re wondering if the impression you got was truthful.”
Those ten minutes might be considered a landscape. A landscape that was painted in my mind and will forever stay there. The truth lies in how I processed those ten minutes. The truth that I will always hug you good-bye. The truth that I tell my loved ones, “I love you,” every day.” Because those special people in my life might just quietly disappear, just as the young man did this morning at that train station.
So now, you have painted your own landscape just from reading this.
The next four photos were taken from the same spot just looking in different directions.
Below: The Gallows
Shortly after the war, camp commander Rudolf Höss was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Survivors requested that he be executed at Auschwitz, and in 1947, he was hanged here. The gallows are preserved behind the crematorium, about a hundred yards from his home where his wife, Hedwig, loved her years here, and read stories to their children, very likely by the light from a lamp with a human-skin lampshade. The family decorated their home with furniture and artwork stolen from prisoners as they were selected for the gas chambers.
From 1940 to 1944, the Höss family lived in a two-story gray stucco villa on the edge of Auschwitz — so close you could see the prisoner blocks and old crematorium from the upstairs window. Hedwig Höss described the place as 'paradise.' They had cooks, nannies, gardeners, chauffeurs, seamstresses, haircutters and cleaners, some of whom were prisoners.
There were five children, three girls and two boys. Brigitte was the daughter who ended up living quietly on a leafy side street in Northern Virginia and worked in a Washington fashion salon.
Soon after she was hired, Brigitte says, she got drunk with her manager and confessed that her father was Rudolf Hoss. The manager told the store’s owner. The owner told Brigitte that she could stay, that she had not committed any crime herself. What Brigitte did not know, at least not until later, was that the store owner and her husband were Jewish and had fled Nazi Germany after the Kristallnacht attacks of 1938.
Rudolf Höss at Auschwitz
Höss introduced Zyklon B containing hydrogen cyanide to the killing process, thereby allowing soldiers at Auschwitz to murder 2,000 people every hour. He created the largest installation for the continuous annihilation of human beings ever known.
The photo on the left is of Höss taken during his detention in 1945 - 1946. The one of above was taken of him just a few minutes before his hanging.
Chimney of the crematorium
Up to 700 people at a time could be gassed here. There were vents in the ceiling where the SS men dropped the Zyklon-B. The facility could burn 340 bodies a day, so it took two days to burn all the bodies from one round of executions. The Nazis didn't like this inefficiency, so they built four more huge crematoria at Birkenau.
I did not take any photos inside !
This was the door before I went in.
This was the door when I came out. Please notice the snow/sleet falling.
As I stood there, I remembered the quote as I walked through the gate earlier that day which said, "Work Sets You Free." New arrivals were told the truth, "The only way out of Auschwitz was through the crematorium chimney."
The snow/sleet mixture eerily fell like ashes onto my black coat.
*****************
This photo below is the entrance to Birkenau.
This is the guard tower shown in several scenes in Schindler's List.
The train track that took the prisoners into the camp
In 1941, realizing that the original Auschwitz camp was too small to meet their needs, the Nazis began a second camp in the nearby farm fields. The original plan was for a camp that could hold 200,000 people, but at it peak, Birkenau held about 100,000. They were still adding onto it when the camp was liberated in 1945.
Above photo taken under the guard tower looking in
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And so, I will leave you with one of the last things I saw as I left this place . . .
"If you should survive, don't forget to tell the World of our destiny."
A few escaped and were heroes. A few helped them. They were heroes, too.
A startling statistic follows this post . . .
Alfréd Israel Wetzler (May 10, 1918 -February 8, 1988) was a Slovak Jew and later wrote under the alias Jozef Lánik. Wetzler was one of a very small number of Jews known to have escaped from Auschwitz during the Holocaust. (April 10, 1944)
Wetzler is known for the report that he and his fellow escapee, Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba compiled about the inner workings of the Auschwitz camp, a ground plan of the camp, construction details of the gas chambers, crematoriums and, most convincingly, a label from a canister of Zyklon B. The 32-page Vrba-Wetzler report, as it became known, was the first detailed report about Auschwitz to reach the West that the Allies regarded as credible. The evidence eventually led to the bombing of several government buildings in Hungary, killing Nazi officials who were instrumental in the railway deportations of Jews to Auschwitz. The deportations halted, saving up to 120,000 Hungarian Jews.
Historian Sir Martin Gilbert said, "Alfred Wetzler was a true hero. His escape from Auschwitz, and the report he helped compile, telling for the first time the truth about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving the lives of thousands of Jews, the Jews of Budapest who were about to be deported to their deaths. No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler had determined for them.
Rudolf Vrba, (September 11, 1924 - March 27, 2006) originally from Slovakia, and Wetzler managed to flee Auschwitz three weeks after German forces invaded Hungary, a German ally, and began deporting the country's Jewish population to Auschwitz.The 40 pages of information the men passed to Jewish officials when they arrived in Slovakia on April 24, which included the information that arrivals were being gassed and not resettled, was included in the Vrba-Wetzler report. While it confirmed material in earlier reports from Polish and other escapees, Miroslaw Karny writes that it was unique in its "unflinching detail."
There was a delay of several weeks before information from the report was distributed widely enough to gain the attention of governments. Mass transports of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz began on May 15, 1944, at a rate of 12,000 people a day; most of them were sent straight to the gas chambers. Vrba argued until the end of his life that the deportees would have refused to board the trains had they known they were not being resettled. His position is generally not accepted by Holocaust historians.
Material from the Vrba–Wetzler and earlier reports appeared in newspapers and radio broadcasts in the United States and Europe, particularly in Switzerland, throughout June and into July 1944, prompting world leaders to appeal to Hungarian regent Miklos Horthy to halt the deportations.On July 7 he ordered an end to them, possibly fearing he would be held responsible after the war. By then 437,000 Jews had been deported, constituting almost the entire Jewish population of the Hungarian countryside, but another 200,000 living in Budapest were saved.
Jerzy Tabeau (December 18, 1918 - May 11, 2012) was a Polish medical student who was one of the first escapees from Auschwitz to give a fully detailed report on the genocide there to the outside world. First reports in early 1942 had been made by the Polish officer Witold Pilecki. Tabeau's report was known as that of the "Polish major" in the Auschwitz Protocols.
In March, on orders of the Underground, Tabeau left Kraków on a mission to get to London in person to give testimony regarding the Polish resistance and confirm to the Allies the truth about the Nazi genocide. The journey took place without dramatic incident. After returning to Poland he went to Sądecczyznę to create a "Socialist Death Battalion." During one of the battles near Jordanow in October 1944, Tabeau was wounded in the head, leaving him partially paralyzed. However he lived to see the end of the war. After 1945 he settled in Kraków, completing his medical studies and graduating from the Jagiellonian University. He became an assistant professor of medical science, and a well-known cardiologist in Kraków.
Below are reports, documentation, and clippings of the activities in Auschwitz and Berkinau. They aren't large enough to read, but they do show how the word finally 'got out' about this place and what was happening.
Executive Office of the President
Below the panel says: Thanks to the courage and self-sacrifice of the camp resistance liaison groups, permanent contact with the free world was maintained.
Below the panel says: Despite the terror, the inhabitants at Oswiecim region were organizing resistance for the prisoners of Auschwitz.
The photo below is of leaders and some activists of the national resistance groups in Auschwitz.
Józef Garliński (Oct0ber 14, 1913 - November 29, 2005) was a Polish historian and prose writer. He wrote many notable books on the history of World War II, some of which were translated into English. In particular, his book Fighting Auschwitz, translated into English in 1975, became a best-seller. Garliński was prisoner number 121421 at the Auschwitz camp and had arrived on May 13, 1943, on the same transport as Jerzy Chmielewski.
******
When I think of a concentration camp, several come to mind. Of course, Auschwitz and Dachau are the first. Then, Plaszow, best known for it's part in "Schindler's List," the camp being commanded by Amon Göth. Until now, I had NO IDEA of how many there were !
According to statistics by the German Ministry of Justice, about 1,200 camps and sub-camps were run in countries occupied by Nazi Germany, while the Jewish Virtual Library estimates that the number of Nazi camps was closer to 15,000 in all of occupied Europe.
There are a few 'inspirational' stories that I found in Auschwitz. One of them is about a Polish priest. For the past several posts, there have been photos of hundreds of prisoners who died here, and it seems fairly easy to scroll past those faces, and in a few minutes, forget about them. But, when those faces have a name and a story . . . well, that face is not so easy to forget.
St. Maksymillan Kolbe (1894 - 1941)
Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish Conventual Franciscan friar most famous for volunteering to die in place of a stranger here.
In 1912 he was sent to Kraków, and in the same year to a college in Rome, where he studied philosophy, theology, mathematics, and physics. He earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1915 at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and the doctorate in theology in 1919 at the Pontifical University of St. Bonaventure. During his time as a student, he witnessed vehement demonstrations against Popes St. Pius X and Benedict XV in Rome and was inspired to organize the Militia Immaculata, or Army of Mary, to work for conversion of sinners and the enemies of the Catholic Church through the intercession of the Virgin Mary. The Immaculata friars utilized the most modern printing and administrative techniques in publishing catechetical and devotional tracts, a daily newspaper with a circulation of 230,000 and a monthly magazine with a circulation of over one million. While he was highly regarded for his devotion to the Catholic Church, some of his writings had an unsettling anti-Semitic sentiment.
Between 1930 and 1936 , he took a series of missions to Japan, where he founded a monastery at the outskirts of Nagasaki, a Japanese paper, and a seminary. The monastery he founded remains prominent in the Roman Catholic Church in Japan. Kolbe decided to build the monastery on a mountain side that, according to Shinto beliefs, was not the side best suited to be in tune with nature. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Kolbe’s monastery was saved because the blast of the bomb hit the other side of the mountain, which took the main force of the blast. Had Kolbe built the monastery on the preferred side of mountain as he was advised, his work and all of his fellow monks would have been destroyed.
Even though he may have been criticized for his anti-Semitic writings, during the World War II he provided shelter to refugees from Greater Poland, including 2,000 Jews whom he hid from Nazi persecution in his friary in Niepokalanów. He was also active as a radio amateur, with Polish call letters SP3RN, vilifying Nazi activities through his reports.
On February 17, 1941, he was arrested by the German Gestapo and was imprisoned in the Pawiak prison. On May 25, was transferred to Auschwitz I as prisoner #16670.
In July 1941 a man from Kolbe’s barracks vanished, prompting SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the deputy camp commander, to choose men from the same barracks to be placed in one of the camps starvation cells to die in order to deter further escape attempts.
This action was based on the Nazi's "Doctrine of Collective Responsibility."
One of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, lamenting his family and who would take care of his wife and children. Kolbe volunteered to take his place.
During the time in the cell, Kolbe led the men in songs and prayer. After several weeks of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe and three others were still alive. (Some reports say Kolbe was the only survivor.) The story of his survival spread throughout the camp, and Kolbe became an inspiration to the other prisoners. To squelch the hope he had given others, the Nazis executed him by a lethal injection of carbolic acid.
It is reported that the man who had disappeared was later found drowned in the camp latrine.
Father Kolbe was beatified as a confessor by Pope Paul VI in 1971 and was canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 10, 1982 in the presence of Franciszek Gajowniczek, the man who he took the place of to go into that starvation cell. Upon canonization, the Pope declared St. Maximilian Kolbe not a confessor, but a martyr.
Block 7 contains the exhibits of living and sanitary conditions. The roofs leaked, the rooms were damp and cold, and the straw and straw mattresses were foul due to many prisoners suffering from diarrhea.
Not only did the prisoners inhabit these horrible buildings, so did vermin and rats.
There was a constant shortage of water for washing and there were no suitable sanitary facilities.
The area between Blocks 6 and 7.
The interior of a room for prisoners until spring of 1941. Prisoners slept crowded together on straw mattresses. In the morning, they had to gather up the mattresses and arrange them in the corner of the room.
Some of the rooms only had straw for the prisoners to sleep on.
The interior of a lavatory for prisoners from 1941 to 1945. Given the over crowding in the barracks, these sanitation facilities were not sufficient for all prisoners. Before they were installed, prisoners used a provisional field latrine.
The interior of a washroom from 1941- 1945. Before these facilities were installed, prisoners had only two wells outside the barracks where they could wash.
Two and three prisoners had to sleep on each bunk, meaning that they had to sleep on their sides in order to fit.
This photo has an eerie reflection . . . the photos hung on the wall behind me are reflected in the glass of this room . . . as if the prisoners are actually in that room.
Even though the purpose of Auschwitz was to murder the innocent people brought here, not all of them were killed immediately. After an initial evaluation, some prisoners were registered and forced to work. This didn't mean they were chosen to live, just to die after they had worked, and probably from starvation.
It is clear from the evidence that Auschwitz was never intended to be a "work camp," where people were kept alive and fed well so they would be healthy enough to do work. People were meant to die here, if not in the gas chamber, or executed, then through malnutrition and overwork.
Block 6 shows some of the elements of the everyday life of the prisoners.
In a word, "Starvation."
There is a room that displays drawings of the arrival process which were sketched by survivors of the concentration camp. After the initial selection, those chosen to work were showered, shaved, and photographed. After a while, the Nazis decided it was just too expensive to photograph all the prisoners, so they were tattooed on the chest or arm.
For the children, they were tattooed on the leg.
The halls are lined with photographs of the victims. The dates of arrival and death show that those registered survived here an average of two to three months.
Thousands and thousands . . .
. . . and thousands of photographs.
It's just automatic to look at the walls with all the black and white photographs as you walk down the the long, long hallways.
But, to look into the eyes of each PERSON and to read the name of that person and to read the occupation of that person is haunting.
The victim is looking straight into the camera, and therefore, looks straight into your eyes, as if to say, "Help me."
The 7,500 survivors that the Red Army found when the camp was liberation were essentially living skeletons. The 'healthier' inmates had been forced to march to Germany.
Of those liberated, 20 percent died soon after of disease and starvation. The daily ration was usually a pan of tea or coffee in the morning, a thin vegetable soup in the afternoon, and a piece of bread for dinner. The bread was often made with sawdust or chestnuts.
The statue, which appears to be looking at more children behind the barbed-wire.
It is called, "Mother and Child."
This statue is called, "Starvation."
I will warn you right now, the following photos are unbelievable and difficult to look at. As with the 'suggestion' at Auschwitz, no children under 14 should visit . . .
Why did I take them?
Why did I post them ?
It was important to me to document this view from my own perspective in order to record the enormity of this place. Not necessarily to understand it. There is no way that looking at a picture of the Grand Canyon can one truly understand the enormity of standing on the rim. And, so it is with this place, the emotion of standing on the same grounds cannot be felt by looking at these photos.
I am in no way comparing a tourist site like the Grand Canyon to Auschwitz. I'm just trying to explain that experiencing this place through literature, history classes, documentaries, etc. can in no way describe the experience of being here.
Room 6 is about Auschwitz's child inmates which comprised twenty percent of the camp's victims.
Blonde, blue-eyed children were either "Germanized" in special schools or, if younger, adopted by German families.
It is apparent, that none of the children pictured below were blonde and blue-eyed.
Dr. Josef Mengele conducted gruesome experiments here on children, especially twins and triplets, ostensibly to find way to increase fertility for German mothers.
I stood on the steps of Block 6 and snapped this photo. I do remember seeing a child's stroller parked on the edge of the road (lower right corner) , but not until now did it 'hit' me . . .
Before you scroll down, IF you scroll down, may I suggest that you watch this CBS news clip with Scott Pelley and Mark Phillips reporting. It aired April 21, 2015.
Inside is just a fraction of the personal belongings the Nazis stole from those imprisoned here.
It is reported that former German SS officer was the Nazi Oskar Gröning who supposedly counted everything you will see in the photos below.
Photo from News.Yahoo.com (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
Former German SS officer Oskar Gröning , dubbed the "bookkeeper of Auschwitz and "the bookkeeper of death," asked for "forgiveness" for his role in mass murder at the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, as his trial began last Tuesday, April 21. (2015) He is shown here getting out of a car at the back entrance of the court hall in Lueneburg, Germany. The 93-year-old former Auschwitz guard faces trial on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder, in a case that will test the argument that anyone who served at a Nazi death camp was complicit in what happened there.
This undated photo made available by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, in Oswiecim, Poland, shows the former Auschwitz-Birkenau guard, Oskar Groening, as a young man in an SS uniform. At the opening of his trial in Lueneburg, Germany on Tuesday, April 21, 2015, the 93-year-old Groening testified that he bears a moral share of the blame for atrocities at the camp, but that it was up to the judges to decide whether he deserved to be convicted as an accessory to murder. (Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau /AP)
Oskar Gröning was born on June 10, 1921. He is a German former SS-Unterscharführer who was stationed at Auschwitz concentration camp. Gröning WANTED to join an elite army unit and set his sights on joining the Waffen-SS. (At the post-war Nuremberg Trials, the Waffen-SS was condemned as a criminal organization due to its connection to the Nazi Party and involvement in numerous war crimes. Waffen-SS veterans were denied many of the rights afforded to veterans who had served in the Heer (army), Luftwaffe (air force), or Kriegmarine (navy). An exception was made for Waffen-SS conscripts sworn in after 1943, who were exempted because of their involuntary servitude. ) Allegedly, he was responsible for counting and sorting the personal items that had been stolen from the exterminated prisoners. Another duty was to guard other belongings in the camp before they were plundered. He witnessed the procedures of the killings, but says he did not help with the killings. After being transferred from Auschwitz to an active unit in 1944, Gröning was captured by the British on June 10, 1945, when his unit surrendered. After being temporarily held in a former concentration camp he was transferred to Britain in 1946, working as a forced laborer.
He returned to Germany to lead a normal life and decided to make his activities at Auschwitz public after learning about Holocaust denial, and has since openly criticized those who deny the events that he witnessed, and the ideology to which he once subscribed.
On December 16, 2014, Hannover state prosecutors ruled that Gröning, aged 93, was fit to stand trial. His trial opened on April 20, 2015, two months after the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp – and coincidentally on Hitler's birthday.
The following link contains interviews with survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau about the trial of Oskar Gröning.
This photo was taken just inside the door of Block 5. I have no idea how many feet long that hallway is of this barrack. The rooms have been turned into exhibits showing the material evidence of crime. The personal belongings of those who 'lived and mostly died' here are encased behind glass walls.
When the Soviet Union liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945, there were 43,000 pairs of shoes in the camp. This photo shows the shoes found in a warehouse.
The shoes have begun to deteriorate which means they were probably disinfected with Zyklon-B to prepare them to send the shoes back to Germany.
Most of the shoes have turned the same drab color, except for a few women's or children's shoes that are made of red leather.
This red shoe stands out like the red coat worn by the little girl in Schindler's List.
This very large display case takes up half of a barracks room and contains the suitcases brought by Jewish victims to the camp.
The Jewish people were instructed to mark their suitcases for later identification and you can still see the names written on the leather cases in large letters.
On some of the suitcases is the word Waisenkind, which means orphan, proof that there were children among the victims at Auschwitz.
The leather suitcases have not deteriorated like the shoes, because the suitcases weren't treated with Zyklon-B. There are also some baskets in this display, used by the victims to carry their meager belongings with them.
If you're observant, you may have located the name of a very famous person above.
It is still questionable if this suitcase belonged to Margot Frank, sister of Anne Frank, one of the Holocaust's most famous victims. After being discovered in Amsterdam by the Nazis, the Frank family was transported here, where they were split up. Margot and Anne were sent to the Bergen-Belsen camp in northern Germany, where they died of typhus shortly before the war ended. Their father, Otto Frank, survived Auschwitz and was found barely alive by the Russians, who liberated the camp in January of 1945.
. This is another display case just as large as the one with all the luggage.
It is filled with the artificial legs, crutches, and braces.
It is said that most of this huge collection came from wounded Polish war veterans from World War I.
The first people the Nazis exterminated were mentally and physically ill German citizens.
Seeing this case with back braces in it nearly brought me to my knees.
Thousands and thousands of brushes.
Thousands
and
thousands
and
thousands . . .
. . . and thousands of
cups
and
pitchers
and
bowls . . .
. . . and thousands and thousands of eye glasses . . .
