I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in July 2025, Nazi Germany’s largest concentration and extermination camp. It was a profoundly shocking experience that will probably stay with me for the rest of my life. Previously, I had only visited the Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany, forty years ago, while travelling on an Interrail pass.

In the autumn of 1939, after occupying Poland, the Germans established a new concentration camp the following year in southern Poland, near the small town of Oświęcim, between Kraków and Katowice. At first, Polish political opponents were brought there. Over the following years, the camp was expanded into a vast complex in which more than 1.1 million people were murdered during the Second World War. The vast majority of the victims were Jews, but Poles, Roma and Sinti, as well as Soviet prisoners of war, were also killed there. Numerically, the largest number of victims came from Hungary, followed by Poland. Among those murdered were also hundreds of Norwegian Jews, as well as the Jewish refugees who had come to Finland and were handed over to the Germans by the Finnish State Police on 6 November 1942. All eight Jews were taken from Germany to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Only one of them survived.

Inside the museum at Auschwitz I, some of the most striking and harrowing exhibits include mountains of personal belongings, shoes piled high, suitcases labelled with their owners’ names, eyeglasses, prosthetic limbs, as well as the room behind glass cases, filled with human hair collected from the victims, amounting, if I recall correctly, to around three thousand kilograms, visually at least the equivalent of a full truckload. These items make abstract numbers painfully concrete.

According to some internet information, the entry to the museum is free, but on location the guided tour ended up costing something like €17 per person. It does require a personalised entry pass, and demand is so high that advance booking is strongly recommended. Otherwise, visitors can face very long queues. The first time I tried to visit there, I arrived maybe at 10 in the morning. That was too late. After a four-hour wait, I didn’t get in. The next time, I was there around six in the morning, leaving Krakow around five by train – and by taxi from the train station. This time, I got in with my group. Actually, we still had to wait a couple of hours at the café, but we knew we’d get in.

Guided tours typically last around three and a half hours and are offered in multiple languages, taking in both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau by a shuttle bus in Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

Walking through the gates and along the tracks where prisoners once arrived is a stark reminder of the personal human cost behind the statistics.

The Industrial Sequence: Underground, Then up

At Auschwitz-Birkenau there are the collapsed ruins of one of the camp’s large gas–chamber–crematorium complexes. Crematoria II and III formed the so-called “large pair”: underground gas chambers with above-ground crematoria, which the SS later blew up and destroyed while evacuating the camp.

People were directed underground via a ramp, and the dead were then brought back up to be burned:

  • Deception and undressing
    Victims were told they were going to bathe or be “disinfected”. They were taken to an undressing area and ordered to leave their belongings.
  • The underground gas chamber
    They were then led into a gas chamber, the doors shut, and Zyklon B introduced.
  • Removal and “processing”
    After death, bodies were removed; hair was cut, valuables searched for, and gold teeth extracted.
  • Up to the furnace hall
    Crematoria II and III had underground killing spacesandabove-ground cremation facilities.
  • Ash disposal into water and earth
    A significant portion of the ash was disposed of in the landscape, including a pond and a river.

Ashes Into the Pond and the River

After victims were murdered in the gas chambers and their bodies burned in the crematoria or open pits, the ashes and bone fragments were handled in ways that reflected the brutal efficiency of the camp’s extermination system. After bodies were burned, bones that did not burn completely were crushed into powder, and this powdery ash was disposed of in several ways. These remains, both ashes and crushed bone, were dumped into nearby rivers such as the Soła and the Vistula, into ponds, or scattered across fields and marshy ground around the camp.

There is an “ash pond” near the ruins of the crematoria. This is a shallow body of water where ash from cremations was disposed of, and ashes of tens of thousands of victims, mostly Jews murdered in the gas chambers, were thrown into this pond during the camp’s operation.

This disposal was part of Nazi efforts to remove evidence of mass murder; throwing ashes into water or scattering them over fields made it harder for outsiders later to know the scale of what had happened. It also reflected the dehumanising logic of the camp. Victims’ remains were treated as industrial waste, not human beings.

The Head of the Embassy of Poland in Helsinki, Tomasz Chłoń, spoke at the Holocaust Remembrance Day event on 27 January 2026, reminding the audience that Auschwitz is the world’s most important memorial to the fate of the victims of the Holocaust. He also stated that at the time, Poland was under German occupation and the camps were established by the Germans, but that some ordinary Poles also assisted the occupiers.

Today, that “pond with ashes” lies among the flat, grassy fields of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, often with long grass growing around it.

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