Auschwitz Birkenau slideshow - more info

Chuck and I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC a few years ago. It’s one thing to read about the Holocaust in a book and another thing to face pictures, diagrams, and artifacts. We both left the Holocaust museum feeling a greater sense of responsibility for our own actions and the actions of others. In particular the DC museum went out of its way to tie the social actions of WWII to the present with a large information center on Darfur . It would have been easier to dismiss events of cultures past and foreign to us, but as Darfur is STILL happening today, the overall museum has a greater impact.

Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camps in Oscwiecm, Poland gave us the same feeling of responsibility through their sheer magnitude. Auschwitz I is in town and could be thought of as a true labor camp (although many human rights violations occurred there as well). Auschwitz I is what the Nazi’s showed the Red Cross when questions arose. The first few slides are from Auschwitz I and show barrack style sleeping quarters in brick buildings, streets, streetscaping including trees and there was even a swimming pool.

Auschwitz II (Birkenau) is several kilometers outside of town in a wide open field, and it is one of the sights we refer to when we talk of the genocide. Its size and openness hides what we all know. The pictures in the slideshow probably won’t convey our feelings of amazement and shame. It is important to understand that the gas chambers of Birkenau were fully operational for only 2 months and in that time >400,000 Hungarian Jews were exterminated. As with the DC museum, it would be easy to dismiss the large scale industrialization of “The Final Solution” as a foreign problem, something that would never happen in America … but the field of chimneys was a ghostly reminder of the Allied saturation bombings in Europe, and the atrocities of Fat Man and Little Boy (the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Approximately 6 million European Jews were murdered as a result of Hitler's planned extermination (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust). The genocide in Darfur has claimed 400,000 lives (source: http://www.darfurscores.org/darfur).