A winter journey to the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibór, Treblinka and Chełmno.
Text: Olivier Willemsen
Photographs: Jan Boeve & Olivier Willemsen
On 27 January 2015 it was exactly 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. In the depths of winter, the former killing factories and mass burial grounds in what is now Poland lie under a thick blanket of snow. At night, the temperature drops to 20° below zero. An account of a three-week journey to the Nazi death camps by author Olivier Willemsen and photographer Jan Boeve.
As part of their concentration camp system, the Nazis created six specialised extermination camps. The aim was to annihilate European Jews and others who, according to Nazi ideology, represented Lebensunwertes Leben – ‘life unworthy of life’. These killing factories were all located in present-day Poland. Most have disappeared completely; the Nazis were skilled at covering their tracks. Sites of horror made way for innocent farms. Trees were planted where once gas chambers had stood. Only Auschwitz and Majdanek have remained largely intact. But every one of these places still has a story to tell.
Auschwitz Stammlager
The village of Oświęcim, better known by its German name of Auschwitz, lies close to the city of Kraków. Here, in the summer of 1940, about six months after the German invasion, the occupying forces turned a few old Polish army barracks into prisons. They were mainly used to detain criminals and political opponents of the Nazi regime. The location, in the south of Poland, had not been chosen at random. Transport facilities were good and the district was rich in valuable natural resources, something that German industrialists were quick to spot. The combination of factories and cheap labour would fuel the exponential growth of the camp at Auschwitz. At its height, the whole complex comprised 40 or more satellite camps, including Monowitz and the labour camps near the IG Farben factory. The two most notorious were the Stammlager (the old army barracks) and the death camp of Birkenau, specially designed for mass destruction.
The brick-built prisons of the Stammlager (also known as Auschwitz I) survived the war, and the whole historic complex remains virtually intact to this day. It’s already busy at nine in the morning. Two men with snow shovels are knocking freshly-fallen snow from the roofs and a woman in a high-viz jacket is guiding the first coaches into the car park. It’s the start of another working day for Auschwitz Museum. Inside, headsets are being handed out. It smells of coffee, and the guides, young and old, welcome groups from all four corners of the world. Entry is free, the only charge is a few zlotys for parking.
Above the entrance to the camp hangs the infamous slogan Arbeit Macht Frei (‘Work Sets You Free’), a sadistic touch by the camp commandant Rudolf Höss. Picture after picture is taken of the grim sign. A group of Italians in woolly hats pose in front of the metal words – their upraised thumbs strike a jarring note. Nearly all the visitors take photos: of the snow-covered gallows where commandant Höss was strung up after the war, the punishment bunker where the Nazis tortured the inmates, the wall where prisoners were executed, the gas chamber. In 2015, the camp attracted more visitors than in any year since it opened to the public in 1947: 1.5 million people – slightly more than the number estimated to have died at Auschwitz in just over four years. The gas chamber, in particular, exerts a morbid fascination. Visitors flock to it, it is the main attraction; the eye of the hurricane of extermination.
The Stammlager had a single gas chamber. The walls of this empty, concrete space are grey; it is bleak and bitterly cold. There is nothing to see, but all the more to imagine. The adjoining room contains two cremation ovens. It is estimated that 60,000 people died on this spot. A few kilometres down the road, the gas chambers of Birkenau claimed over a million victims.
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Birkenau, the ‘Gate of Death’, often features in films. Like in Schindler’s List, where you see a train arriving on a freezing cold evening, awaited by SS guards with ferociously barking Alsatians, as ash and cinders rain down from the crematoria. Today, too, it’s freezing: the long, narrow reception building is shrouded in icy mist. The thermometer says 15° below zero, but it’s the ghastly gate that is the most spine-chilling. From the watchtower, visitors can look out, like camp guards, over the immense white expanse. The train rails that run underneath the building stretch to the far side of the huge complex. The track was in fact only constructed in the last months of the camp. Prior to that, cattle trucks would unload their human freight at the Judenrampe (Jew ramp), a wooden ramp near Oświęcim railway station.
After the summer of 1941, the capacity of Stammlager Auschwitz I proved insufficient. So a new camp was built in the birch woods near the village of Brzezinka (German: Birkenau), gradually expanding to become the central collection point for the Endlösung or ‘Final Solution’, the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews. Cattle trucks arrived at the Judenrampe from all over Europe, packed to bursting, mainly with Jews and gypsies (Roma and Sinti). On arrival, over half were sent on to the gas chambers of Birkenau. Just before liberation by the Russians, the Nazis blew up those killing factories, but they were too late to obliterate the entire camp. A few buildings still stand as melancholy relicts of the past. Most of the wooden barracks in which the prisoners lived (former stables, efficiently packed with bunk beds) were destroyed by fire, or their planks re-used. Only their brick chimneys remain, poking up like tombstones from the wintery expanse.
Blown gas chamber
Next to an ash pond at the back of the terrain – the ash from the cremation ovens was dumped in ponds – a young deer shoots out of the woods. It bounds over the white fields under which lie the foundations of the Canada barracks, so named because Canada was seen as a land of plenty. Loot in the shape of clothes, personal possessions and human hair was stored here. The deer continues on its way, leaping over the ruins of Crematorium IV where, on 7 October 1944, the legendary revolt of the Sonderkommando took place. This heroic uprising delayed the extermination process, if only for a little while, to the fury of the Nazis.
Birkenau: The dr. Horst Schumann barrack used for his twin experiments
Remains of Camp Monowitz (Auschwitz III – IG Farben)
In a bar where youngsters hang out, in Oświęcim’s town square, Anna (19), shrugs her shoulders when we ask about the camps. ‘Oh, that was all a long time ago,’ she says, as she sips a vodka cocktail. She can vaguely remember having gone there on a school trip. ‘It’s for tourists,’ Anna explains, and asks us in turn whether we’ve ever been to a Pearl Jam concert. She’s never heard of Dr Josef Mengele or his experiments on twins in Birkenau.
Belzec
We travel further east, heading for Belzec. In 1942 over half a million people were killed just outside this hamlet, in a period of less than ten months. Afterwards, the Nazis razed the camp to the ground to cover up their crime. Death camps were built and dismantled in the manner of an expedition. That’s one of the reasons why the camps in the far east of the country are much less well-known than Auschwitz, which has survived largely intact.
Belzec was the very first killing factory set up during Aktion Reinhard, an operation aimed at eradicating all Polish Jews. It is thought to have been named after Reinhard Heydrich, ‘the Butcher of Prague’, a high-ranking Nazi liquidated some months earlier by British and Czech soldiers. He had been tipped to succeed Hitler.
Most Jews from the districts around Belzec were transported to this camp. Almost all were killed the same day they arrived. In their final hours their hair was cut, and they were made to hand over their possessions and strip – an efficient system that was perfected in later camps. After they had been gassed, the Sonderkommando (a work unit made up of prisoners) was ordered to drag the bodies to mass graves. At a later stage, though, Nazi officials ordered all the bodies to be dug up and burnt in the open air. The extermination industry was still in its infancy, and the camp commandants and engineers swapped notes in their efforts to achieve greater perfection. Local residents testified that grey-black clouds of smoke would belch from the camp for days on end, after which they had to scrape body fat from their windows. As late as 1999, an archaeological dig laid bare 33 mass graves with human remains.
Station Sign Belzec
The memorial erected on the former camp site, a joint project by the Polish government and an American-Jewish committee, dates from 2004. Entire local communities died in the gas chambers of Belzec. Their names or places of origin are recorded along the path that surrounds the terrain. Most are covered by snow. An occasional place name, a whole village that was wiped out, has been revealed with the rub of a sleeve.
Apart from the man in charge and the woman at the reception desk in the little museum, the memorial site remains deserted all day. The woman explains that it’s always quiet in winter. ‘You’re the first visitors today, and very likely the only ones,’ she says. Whereas in Auschwitz, flowers are laid every day next to the site of the crematoria and dozens of red grave candles shed their soft light, here the only token of mourning is a lone withered rose. The victims left few if any next of kin. The Nazis exterminated most of the Polish Jews; many bloodlines ended in the death camps. In the afternoon, the woman and the man team up to clear the snow from the path around the monument.
Majdanek
The city of Lublin lies about 130 kilometres north of Belzec. It was here that the headquarters of operation Aktion Reinhard was based. Once a small town, it has now expanded hugely, almost swallowing up Majdanek. The camp covered an even larger area than Birkenau, and is still very much intact – frighteningly so, in fact.
The camp was left almost in its original state. It was abandoned in haste, in the face of advancing Soviet troops. Its current location, in the middle of a residential neighbourhood, is surreal – what must it be like to see that every time you open the bedroom curtains? There are only a few visitors wandering around. The car park is completely empty, apart from a battered old coach with snow chains on the back wheels. The chauffeur is killing time by reading a newspaper that he’s spread across the steering wheel.
Majdanek was in operation for about three years as a concentration and extermination camp. Built in 1941, it originally housed Russian prisoners of war. Later it was used to store large quantities of loot from the other death camps. Around 60,000 Jews died at this spot. Estimates of the total number of victims, as in so many other death camps, vary enormously: between 80,000 and 250,000.
Shoe barak
The Nazis didn’t manage to blow up the gas chambers. So the Bad und Desinfektion (bath and disinfection) barracks are still scarily intact, right down to the carbon monoxide cylinders. They even seem to be hooked up, as if ready for instant re-use. Cans of Zyklon B are piled up in an adjacent chamber. Designed as a pesticide, it was originally intended as a delousing agent, or to control typhoid outbreaks. But grim experiments at Auschwitz Stammlager, in the cellars of punishment bunker 11, showed that the cyanide was also an effective (and cheap) mass killing tool. At Birkenau, especially, Zyklon B was used on a huge scale. An SS guard with a gas mask would open a hatch in the ceiling and empty the cyanide granules into the chamber. Suffocation followed within minutes – the more people were packed into the room, the quicker they died.
Dissection table to remove golden tooth.
Today a party of schoolchildren is visiting the Majdanek barrack of horrors. It’s the group that came in the old coach. One at a time they peer through the peephole into the gas chambers. The cyanide has turned the ceiling and walls inky blue. The children hold their breath for a moment. This isn’t just any old peepshow. The message hits home, no one talks. In the afternoon some of them can be seen praying next to the crematorium’s ‘Mountain of Ashes’ at the back of the complex. They stand a metre apart, motionless. Dusk is falling and it’s snowing lightly. Some of the children have Israeli flags draped over their backs like capes.
Sobibór
The road to the village of Sobibór, from which the death camp took its name, is treacherous. Fresh snow has fallen and it’s too early in the morning to be able to follow in the tracks of other vehicles. The car skids on the road. It’s 19° below zero. The border with Ukraine is only a stone’s throw away. A sinister dark row of pines and old birch trees lines the road like a guard of honour. If only they could talk. The columns of Nazi trucks, escorted by soldiers on their moss-green motorcycles with sidecars, would have driven below their branches.
The route to Sobibór
Like Belzec, nearly every trace of Sobibór camp has disappeared. The only relic conjuring up the past is the arrival platform, with its rusty, weather-beaten station sign. Sobibór station was the final destination for many Dutch Jews, so Sobibór and the Netherlands are forever tragically linked. Alongside the railway line, which hasn’t been used for years, two men are doing something with a tractor and tree trunks. They seem amazed to see two visitors in a car with foreign plates at this time of day. Parallel to the tracks where trains halted at the village – a lumberjack settlement – stands the green wooden house where Sobibór’s camp commandant lived. It’s now the home of the local forester. We try to picture how the camp must have looked on arrival: a wooden bird hide next to the platform helps set the scene.
After the legendary revolt in 1943, when the prisoners killed their guards and broke through the fences, the camp was razed to the ground the very same day. Here, too, the Nazis tried to cover their tracks. Vainly, it turns out. Excavations over the years have brought to light various artefacts and more recently, fragments of human teeth, a Dutch one-cent coin dating from 1941 and gas chamber remains. It is estimated that between 150,000 and 250,000 people were gassed in Sobibór. Over 33,000 Dutch Jews died here.
Treblinka
The most lethal camp for Polish Jews was Treblinka II. It’s thought that between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were murdered here in less than 18 months. Most came from the ghettos of Warsaw and Bialystok. When they built the camp, the Nazis drew on their experiences in Belzec and Sobibór, perfecting every detail: mass extermination was to be as quick, orderly and efficient as possible.
Treblinka is a village on the railway line between Warsaw and Bialystok. The extermination camp lies a few kilometres away in the woods. It’s hard to find a way in. Anyone expecting signposts is in for a disappointment. The car park is hidden under a thick blanket of snow.
The camp disappeared off the face of the earth even before the war ended. As soon as it was dismantled a farm house was built on the site for a Ukrainian camp guard, and the land ploughed over. This prevented archaeological research at the time, though digs have since been carried out. Survivors testified that the Nazis had constructed a fake railway station at Treblinka II (Treblinka I was a small concentration camp two kilometres away) complete with ticket windows and departure times to places like Vienna and Berlin, in order to lull the arriving victims into believing they had come to a regular transit camp. This facade was part of Nazi efforts to perfect the killing machine.
Monument arrivals track
Nowadays, the camp perimeter is marked by large stones, a bit like menhirs. The railway track is symbolised by granite sleepers. Thousands of stones stick up out of the snow in this flat expanse, reflecting the old Jewish tradition of laying a stone on a grave. Engraved on them are the names of the victims. The mass grave of Treblinka, immortalised in granite. A huge, impressive stone monument, with a menorah carved on top, marks the spot where the gas chambers are thought to have stood. We don’t see a soul all afternoon. Not even a caretaker. We’re alone here, though it feels as if wolves are watching us hungrily from the surrounding forests. Only a few old footprints, filled with a layer of fresh snow, betray the presence of other visitors. Night begins to fall on the silent, bleak burial ground that is Treblinka.
Chełmno
Chełmno. The very first camp where gas was used for mass extermination. Here, the Nazis used ‘gas vans’. A hose attached to the exhaust pipe led inside the van, gassing the occupants. This method was the forerunner of the gas chambers, where murder could take place on a larger scale. Yet at least 150,000 people were killed in this way at Chełmno, mainly Jews from the ghetto of Lodz.
Chelmno Waldlager and museum
The camp consisted of two parts: the Schlosslager, an old manor house where the gas vans stood, and the Waldlager, deep in the forest of Rzuwowski, four kilometres away. The bodies of those who were gassed were dumped in mass graves in the Waldlager. Later, their remains were dug up and cremated, just as in Belzec, to wipe out all traces of the Endlösung. All eyewitness accounts mention the stench, the intolerable smell that arose when a mass grave was opened. The outlines of these graves can still be seen. A Star of David watches over them. Sticking up between the frosted branches of a few pine trees there’s a flagpole. An Israeli flag hangs from it, motionless.
Monument Chelmno Waldlager
Next to the entrance to the Schlosslager is a rack of gas canisters: propane and butane. They’re actually for sale – how macabre. This camp is small, at least smaller than we’ve seen in recent weeks. A white church stands on a hill near the site. The victims were temporarily housed there if there was no room left in the manor house. The foundations of the house can still be seen – it was blown up, with the last group of prisoners still inside it, when the camp was abandoned on 7 April 1943.
Chelmno Schlosslager
A modest museum, not much bigger than a Portakabin, stands on the Schlosslager site. The exhibits are mostly objects that have been dug up: toys, combs, beads, charms, but also teeth. An old man looks after the finds, arranged in a well-polished showcase. He insists that you sign the visitors’ book. ‘It’s hard to believe that people can do such things,’ the last visitor but one has written in English. The entry dates from over three weeks ago. We too add something to the book, before heading back to the Netherlands.
© Olivier Willemsen
Translation thanks to the Dutch Literary Fund
‘Morgen komt Liesbeth’
a novel by Olivier Willemsen, 2014
Uitgeverij De Harmonie
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