This is the outer barrier of Auschwitz I. On the left are former barracks and on the right S.S. offices, houses and administrative buildings. Some spaces are still used today as offices for the museum.

Photos and reflection by Kate Ott
Sopris Stars Correspondent

The Holocaust was one of the worst genocides in human history. Considering it wasn’t even 100 years ago, it’s still terrifying. The systematic, industrial killing of over 6 million people in the course of seven years, is anything but natural. I struggle to wrap my head around the fact that humans were capable of doing such things to each other. The following is a series of thoughts and reflections from my time experiencing ground-zero of the Holocaust. 

Inside a restored barrack at Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II), each level of the three-tiered bunks held 10 people. Some barracks held over 1,000 at a time, with no bathrooms or sanitary facilities.

In early February, I had the opportunity to spend two weeks traveling throughout Germany and Poland to study the Holocaust. The trip took my group from Munich, to Berlin and finally to Krakow. While we had time to explore new cities, the trip was largely focused on visiting historical sites — museums, memorials and concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau (one of the first concentration camps built under the Nazi regime). 

I’ll admit, I struggle to put it into words, but being there was entirely different than just learning about it at school. I spent about a full day at Dachau on a guided tour, where we went through on-site museums and preserved buildings.  

Remains of gas chamber two, one of the main gas chambers used at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Coupled with gas chamber three, over one-million people were killed in the two buildings. In an attempt to destroy evidence at the end of the war, both chambers were bombed with explosives.

I was struck by how much I didn’t know. I didn’t know about the Jewish ghettos, or that the concentration camps worked in systems. All I really knew was from pop culture, and I can’t remember the last time I learned about the Holocaust in school. For an atrocity of that scale, I didn’t understand why it wasn’t a bigger part of my education.

The Schutzstaffel (SS), who managed concentration camps, called the hallway of Dachau’s prison the “garrison detention.” Prisoners referred to it as the “bunker.” Dachau was the first concentration camp built during the Holocaust, first detaining innocents in March of 1933. It was the center for torture, where people endured brutal treatment.

 Walking through Dachau I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that the Holocaust really happened. The sheer number of people who would have been working in Dachau alone was impossible to visualize. Visiting Auschwitz felt like walking into a movie I wished was fictional. No amount of reading or studying could ever replicate what it was like being there. 

There was one part of the exhibit that I was not allowed to photograph that made me sick: a room full of hair taken from victims. When I first entered and went to my right, there was a display case with several neatly braided bunches of hair raised on what looked to be a 20-to-30-foot, rolled up, rug-like textile. The entire piece was made with human hair.

I followed the edge of the room, and was met with a case that spanned the entire length of the wall. It was filled with a two-ton pile of hair, taken from over 30,000 women. The hair was discovered, after the camp’s liberation in 1945, in piles that were ready to be shipped to textile factories. My words can’t describe how it made me feel, but nothing has ever left a deeper pit in my stomach. Seeing the remains of so many people being stripped of their humanity and treated like cattle was devastating.

A pile of shoes collected from the belongings of new arrivals at the camp. Prisoners called the warehouses where goods were sorted “Kanada” (Canada in German). To prisoners, Canada symbolized wealth, and the warehouses were full of people’s personal belongings.

A phrase our tour guide used often was “industrial killing.” I thought at first it was another buzz-word kind of saying, but I was incredibly wrong. The term fits too well. Everything was built for efficiency and left no space for humanity. Over-crowded barracks, terribly unsanitary facilities and unsustainable rations of 1,000 calories a day for 16 hours of labor. The level of dehumanization these victims felt, and the system that perpetuated it was so severe that you start to question how people could even manufacture that reality. 

Visiting these places drove home just how recent the Holocaust was. This was such a big event in history that can’t be ignored and its remains are scattered throughout today.

George Santayana, a Spanish philosopher, once famously said: “Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it.” Considering some of the parallels I’ve drawn, I understand exactly what he meant.

Auschwitz-Birkenau as seen from the train tracks. The watch tower was used for security monitoring. In the background are hundreds of brick chimneys, each one belonging to a different barrack. The chimneys are the only thing standing because the barracks in this section were made out of wood planks. Only 10% of people brought here lived in this area, the rest were immediately sent to the gas chambers.
Empty containers of zyklon-B (a form of hydrogen cyanide) displayed in the Auschwitz 1 museum. Zyklon-B was the main chemical used in the chambers, and was first experimented on humans at the same site.
A photo of “Fallen Leaves,” an installation by Menashe Kadishman made up of roughly 10,000 face cut-outs made from thick steel plates meant to represent the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Visitors are encouraged to walk across and back while looking down.