by Janet Sandford

Created on: October 20, 2009

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is a grim destination and afterwards you will want some time to contemplate what you have seen. The exhibits are designed to provoke a strong emotional response to one of the blackest crimes in European history. In my opinion the museum is not appropriate for children under the age of fourteen.

Auschwitz has become a symbol of the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes as a whole. Contrary to popular opinion, it was not the deadliest of the Nazi death camps. Its fame is in part due to the inmates, including writers like Tadeuz Borowski (1922 - 51) and Elie Weisel (b. 1928), who survived to tell their grisly tale. However, Auschwitz - Birkenau combined all the different functions of the Nazi camps: prisoner-of-war camp, concentration camp, work camp and death camp.

Although the exact numbers are not known, the vast majority of the camp's victims were indubitably there simply because thy were Jews. Auschwitz, however, also held many other inmates: gypsies, communists, homosexuals, Polish intellectuals and political prisoners, as well as Soviet prisoners of war.

Soviet soldiers were the first to be killed with Zyklon B in experimental gas chambers. Later, the gas was mostly used on Jewish victims. Many who survived the gas chambers were shot, starved, worked to death, experimented on or otherwise killed by the harsh conditions in the camp. Most historians believe that 1.1 and 1.5 million prisoners were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Nazi camp operated from 1940 when the first transport of Polish political prisoners arrived. At first Poles were imprisoned and then died there but from 1942 Auschwitz became a site of mass murder committed against the European Jews as part of the Nazi plan to completely destroy them. The site was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945.

The museum includes two sections of the camps: the brick buildings at Auschwitz 1 (mostly for political prisoners and prisoners of war) and the immense concentration and death camp at Auschwitz 11 - Birkenau (mostly for Jews and gypsies). To visit both camps will take several hours and is obviously a day's visit. In the Summer, a bus runs between both sites. I recommend you visit the Auschwitz museum before Birkenau as the former explains the history of the two camps. Also, watch the short documentary film first which can be viewed in a cinema near the main entrance. It gives an insight into events leading up to the culmination of the worst crime ever committed in the twentieth

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