{"id":305,"date":"2026-01-27T22:27:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T22:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ilovepoland.fi\/?p=305"},"modified":"2026-01-28T10:44:27","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T10:44:27","slug":"auschwitz-visiting-the-home-of-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ilovepoland.fi\/?p=305","title":{"rendered":"Auschwitz: Visiting the Home of Horror"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in July 2025, Nazi Germany\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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 O\u015bwi\u0119cim, between Krak\u00f3w 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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According to some internet information, the entry to the museum is free, but on location the guided tour ended up costing something like \u20ac17 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\u2019t get in. The next time, I was there around six in the morning, leaving Krakow around five by train \u2013 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 caf\u00e9, but we knew we\u2019d get in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Walking through the gates and along the tracks where prisoners once arrived is a stark reminder of the personal human cost behind the statistics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Industrial Sequence: Underground, Then up<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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At Auschwitz-Birkenau there are the collapsed ruins of one of the camp\u2019s large gas\u2013chamber\u2013crematorium complexes. Crematoria II and III formed the so-called \u201clarge pair\u201d: underground gas chambers with above-ground crematoria, which the SS later blew up and destroyed while evacuating the camp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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People were directed underground via a ramp, and the dead were then brought back up to be burned:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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