Understanding My Polish Pride
When I first arrived in Poland my first thought was “Why do I feel so proud to have Polish heritage?” Ever since I was a child, my father and I were always quick to tell people we were Polish. According to an individual I met I met in Vienna, Austria that lives in Poland, Polish people are often viewed as fat, lazy, etc. by many people in Europe. Upon my arrival to Warsaw, I thought about what the guy in Vienna said and that it isn’t possible for Polish people to have national pride. Like Germany, their national pride must not exist. I was definitely wrong. The first sight I saw in Warsaw was Polish flags hanging everywhere: hanging from the sides of houses, buildings, and cars. At that moment, I knew that Poland had a lot of national pride. But how was this possible after everything they experienced in the first half of the 20th century? After arriving at the central bus station in Warsaw, I took a smaller bus to the center of the city. I met a native woman from Warsaw on the bus and she explained why Polish people have so much pride for their country. The Poles have been through so much rough history in the past 100 years. Poland was split between Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, and Russian Empire during World War I, where tens of thousands of Poles were killed in the crossfire of many of the battles. In 1939, Poland was attacked by Germany in the beginning of September and then by the USSR in the middle of September. The country was partitioned between Germany and Russia through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August of 1939. The Poles were then persecuted at the hands of the Nazis and Russians for nearly five years. The Nazis built labor and death camps, mainly for Jews, where hundreds of thousands of Poles were executed. Even through all the atrocities that Poland faced during WWI and WWII, the country still exists and the people endure. War and the Nazis may have taken Poland’s people, but not its pride, honor, and sense of nationalism. The endurance that the Polish people have is why I am proud to be a Pole. This journey to Warsaw and, eventually, Auschwitz I and Birkenau, was an opportunity to discover my Polish heritage.
Visiting Auschwitz I in Poland
I took a guided tour through Auschwitz I so that I could speak with the tour guide and fully understand what occurred at the concentration camp. The tour guide began the experience by playing a video during our ride to Auschwitz I. The narrator of the video was a Russian man who was a kapo, a prisoner that was assigned by the SS guards of the camp to supervise forced labor and carry out administrative tasks, in Auschwitz I from 1944 until 1945. I had never considered the life of kapos in the concentration camps, and, after hearing the man’s experiences accompanied by vivid pictures, I felt like I did. Prisoners were tortured, worked vigorously, and killed. Kapos were treated similarly while also being forced to hurt other prisoners and cremate dead bodies. The man in the video described how an SS officer put a pistol to his head and forced him, for the first time, to beat a fellow prisoner to death. As if beating a prisoner to death wasn’t bad enough, the man was then forced to cremate the body. I asked my tour guide if the man’s experience was typical and he told me that it was the method the SS used to harden kapos. I feel as though this video gave me a lot of insight into the life of kapos in the camps and changed my opinion of them. I always thought the kapos were collaborators and wanted to serve the SS so that they could survive. This is far from true.
My first impression of Auschwitz I when walking off the bus was how quite it was. The only sound I could hear was the rustling of tree branches and bushes against the wind. The entire site was composed of buildings, trees, bushes, and dirt. There was very little grass or green space, adding to the ominous mood the camp set. I could feel that the place was once full of suffering simply based off the environment. I walked through the “Arbeit Macht Frei”, meaning “Work Makes Freedom”, sign and began going through each of the buildings one by one. I learned that the buildings in Auschwitz I were originally used by the Polish military before WWII. I saw the living conditions, which composed of straw on a floor, of many of the inmates as well as the supplies they had packed in suitcases and brought to Auschwitz I which the SS had confiscated. The SS recycled everything they could, including shoes, clothing, and even personal toiletries, that was confiscated from inmates. The recycled goods were repurposed in factories throughout Germany and Poland and sent to German troops on the front. On top of the inmates personal belongings, the SS also shaved their hair. I thought the reason the inmate’s hair was shaved was to prevent lice. The real reason was because hair could be used to create clothing and stuffed in pillows that would be distributed to German soldiers on the front. Our tour guide took us through a room filled with tons of human hair, representing only 1% of the hair ever collected from the camp’s inmates by the SS. Seeing all the hair made me want to vomit. The thought of making clothing from human hair and then expecting soldiers to wear it was gross. As if I thought the SS’s resourcefulness couldn’t be worse, they also used the skin of inmates to create wallets and cigarette holders. Words cannot describe how I felt when I was told this.
The tour of Auschwitz I ended with a trip through the only gas chamber from Nazi camps left intact. Our tour guides told us that the SS destroyed most gas chambers as they left the camps to hide the evidence of their atrocities from the liberating soldiers. The reason why the chamber in Auschwitz I was left standing was so that the SS could use it as cover during Allied bombings. All I could think is that the SS were cowards and that they knew what they were doing was wrong. Based off what I have read and learned in courses, many SS soldiers were brainwashed, since a young age, to believe that Aryans and they are the “Master Race” and that other races must be exterminated. If the SS truly believed this, then why would they want to hide the evidence of exterminating “inferior” races? My conclusion: they knew what they were doing is wrong. So then why did they do this? Anger? I could see beating a prisoner to death out of anger, but mass murdering people doesn’t make sense. Anger is definitely not the reason. A feeling of superiority? If this were the case, they would be proud to mass murder “inferior” people but they obviously were not. Every reason I came up with didn’t make any sense, except for one. The only reasonable answer is that the SS, like all human beings, are naturally killers and that violence is part of who they are as humans. My first reaction to coming to this conclusion was that others would believe that this is irrational and crazy. My conclusion is not crazy though. It simply views human beings as evil by nature instead of good. This realization is by far my most important takeaway from visiting Auschwitz I. Walking through the gas chamber was a powerful experience. This was the first gas chamber ever created by the Nazis and it is where they determined the type of chemical to use as well as the amount for effectively killing individuals. Standing where thousands of individuals suffocated to death made my knees weak. Seeing where the bodies were burned afterwards, a job given to the kapos by the SS, was even more disturbing.
My first impression of Auschwitz I when walking off the bus was how quite it was. The only sound I could hear was the rustling of tree branches and bushes against the wind. The entire site was composed of buildings, trees, bushes, and dirt. There was very little grass or green space, adding to the ominous mood the camp set. I could feel that the place was once full of suffering simply based off the environment. I walked through the “Arbeit Macht Frei”, meaning “Work Makes Freedom”, sign and began going through each of the buildings one by one. I learned that the buildings in Auschwitz I were originally used by the Polish military before WWII. I saw the living conditions, which composed of straw on a floor, of many of the inmates as well as the supplies they had packed in suitcases and brought to Auschwitz I which the SS had confiscated. The SS recycled everything they could, including shoes, clothing, and even personal toiletries, that was confiscated from inmates. The recycled goods were repurposed in factories throughout Germany and Poland and sent to German troops on the front. On top of the inmates personal belongings, the SS also shaved their hair. I thought the reason the inmate’s hair was shaved was to prevent lice. The real reason was because hair could be used to create clothing and stuffed in pillows that would be distributed to German soldiers on the front. Our tour guide took us through a room filled with tons of human hair, representing only 1% of the hair ever collected from the camp’s inmates by the SS. Seeing all the hair made me want to vomit. The thought of making clothing from human hair and then expecting soldiers to wear it was gross. As if I thought the SS’s resourcefulness couldn’t be worse, they also used the skin of inmates to create wallets and cigarette holders. Words cannot describe how I felt when I was told this.
The tour of Auschwitz I ended with a trip through the only gas chamber from Nazi camps left intact. Our tour guides told us that the SS destroyed most gas chambers as they left the camps to hide the evidence of their atrocities from the liberating soldiers. The reason why the chamber in Auschwitz I was left standing was so that the SS could use it as cover during Allied bombings. All I could think is that the SS were cowards and that they knew what they were doing was wrong. Based off what I have read and learned in courses, many SS soldiers were brainwashed, since a young age, to believe that Aryans and they are the “Master Race” and that other races must be exterminated. If the SS truly believed this, then why would they want to hide the evidence of exterminating “inferior” races? My conclusion: they knew what they were doing is wrong. So then why did they do this? Anger? I could see beating a prisoner to death out of anger, but mass murdering people doesn’t make sense. Anger is definitely not the reason. A feeling of superiority? If this were the case, they would be proud to mass murder “inferior” people but they obviously were not. Every reason I came up with didn’t make any sense, except for one. The only reasonable answer is that the SS, like all human beings, are naturally killers and that violence is part of who they are as humans. My first reaction to coming to this conclusion was that others would believe that this is irrational and crazy. My conclusion is not crazy though. It simply views human beings as evil by nature instead of good. This realization is by far my most important takeaway from visiting Auschwitz I. Walking through the gas chamber was a powerful experience. This was the first gas chamber ever created by the Nazis and it is where they determined the type of chemical to use as well as the amount for effectively killing individuals. Standing where thousands of individuals suffocated to death made my knees weak. Seeing where the bodies were burned afterwards, a job given to the kapos by the SS, was even more disturbing.
Visiting Birkenau in Poland
Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp developed by the Third Reich in 1940. It is best known for the location where a majority of the medical experiments were performed by the Third Reich. Birkenau is a branch camp of Auschwitz that is the largest death camp built by the Nazis. There is very little evidence today present at Birkenau to prove it was a death camp – compliments of the SS that destroyed all the gas chambers and trucks upon their departure from the camp. The entire camp is an open space with an entrance gate and tower, barbed wire to divide the camp into sections, train tracks that were used to bring prisoners into the camp, and guard towers. The camp itself is less compact than Auschwitz.
When I entered the camp I was astonished by the size. It was massive. All I could think about was how difficult it must have been for prisoners to move from one section to another (a matter of miles) during the blazing heat of summer and freezing cold of winter. I had a tour guide when visiting Birkenau that gave us all the details about how the camp was laid out and the structure of prisoner transportation and killing. The tour guide had a low, deep voice that contained sadness in it. He was very informative and one could tell that he just wanted other people to understand and respect the camp. My goal when visiting the camp was to follow the progression of an individual’s journey through the camp during the Holocaust, starting from when they arrived by railcar. The tour guide assisted in helping me imagine the journey of an inmate.
Prisoners were brought from various countries in Europe, ranging from Norway to Russia, which I did not know before visiting the camp, to Birkenau to be exterminated or tested on. Dozens of people were crammed into a small railcar without any food or water. Upon arrival to the camp, they were forced out of the cars by SS and dogs, some of which ate the individuals alive. Trying to imagine the situation hundreds of thousands of people were in was unbearable. The fear with which they had as men yelled at them in German and beat them for no rime or reason. Upon exiting the cars, everyone was searched for any personal belongings, often violated and humiliated in the process. They were then forced to walk half a kilometer past countless guard towers surrounded by electrified barbed wire and containing SS with machine guns. By this point in time, most of the people that arrived knew that they were going to be killed and were panicking. To calm the individuals as they marched, the SS told them that they were not going to be killed and that they were just marching them to the registration and sanitation buildings. Upon arrival to the “registration building”, prisoners were subjected to exams by a medical officer, where they were classified as able to work or not able to work. Those not able to work were marched into the forest to gas chambers, which the SS called “showers”, and stripped naked. The SS even built brick walls between the buildings where men and women were gased. They did this to soothe the women as they stripped down naked and prevent them from complaining. The individuals that were fit to work were temporarily crammed into buildings where they worked for a few days before dying of exhaustion or dehydration. The average life expectancy of inmates was three weeks or less.
Visiting Birkenau was by far the most emotional experience that I had of the three camps I visited. Unlike Auschwitz and Dachau, there was no one living around Birkenau. And there is a reason why: it is known as a place of death by many Polish individuals. The Nazis were not just cruel physically, but also emotionally. In some sense, they tricked the prisoners and gave them a sense of reassurance for no reason. They could have just shot prisoners who began to freak out (which they probably did at times), but they often didn’t because they did not want to scare the other prisoners.
When I entered the camp I was astonished by the size. It was massive. All I could think about was how difficult it must have been for prisoners to move from one section to another (a matter of miles) during the blazing heat of summer and freezing cold of winter. I had a tour guide when visiting Birkenau that gave us all the details about how the camp was laid out and the structure of prisoner transportation and killing. The tour guide had a low, deep voice that contained sadness in it. He was very informative and one could tell that he just wanted other people to understand and respect the camp. My goal when visiting the camp was to follow the progression of an individual’s journey through the camp during the Holocaust, starting from when they arrived by railcar. The tour guide assisted in helping me imagine the journey of an inmate.
Prisoners were brought from various countries in Europe, ranging from Norway to Russia, which I did not know before visiting the camp, to Birkenau to be exterminated or tested on. Dozens of people were crammed into a small railcar without any food or water. Upon arrival to the camp, they were forced out of the cars by SS and dogs, some of which ate the individuals alive. Trying to imagine the situation hundreds of thousands of people were in was unbearable. The fear with which they had as men yelled at them in German and beat them for no rime or reason. Upon exiting the cars, everyone was searched for any personal belongings, often violated and humiliated in the process. They were then forced to walk half a kilometer past countless guard towers surrounded by electrified barbed wire and containing SS with machine guns. By this point in time, most of the people that arrived knew that they were going to be killed and were panicking. To calm the individuals as they marched, the SS told them that they were not going to be killed and that they were just marching them to the registration and sanitation buildings. Upon arrival to the “registration building”, prisoners were subjected to exams by a medical officer, where they were classified as able to work or not able to work. Those not able to work were marched into the forest to gas chambers, which the SS called “showers”, and stripped naked. The SS even built brick walls between the buildings where men and women were gased. They did this to soothe the women as they stripped down naked and prevent them from complaining. The individuals that were fit to work were temporarily crammed into buildings where they worked for a few days before dying of exhaustion or dehydration. The average life expectancy of inmates was three weeks or less.
Visiting Birkenau was by far the most emotional experience that I had of the three camps I visited. Unlike Auschwitz and Dachau, there was no one living around Birkenau. And there is a reason why: it is known as a place of death by many Polish individuals. The Nazis were not just cruel physically, but also emotionally. In some sense, they tricked the prisoners and gave them a sense of reassurance for no reason. They could have just shot prisoners who began to freak out (which they probably did at times), but they often didn’t because they did not want to scare the other prisoners.
Visiting Dachau in Germany
I knew more about Dachau than any other concentration camp created during the Third Reich. It was the first official concentration camp opened for war and political prisoners in 1934. I thought I knew almost everything about Dachau before entering the concentration camp near Munich, Germany. Gladly, my experience touring around the camp memorial, reading the information posted, and talking with some of the individuals that worked there helped me to understand Dachau just a bit more. Heinrich Himmler (), and Adolf Hitler devised the camp as a scare tactic to warn people of the consequences of opposing the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party). The camp also had one of the lowest death rates of any Nazi concentration camp of its size. Afterall, Dachau was built as a work camp and not a death or concentration camp. The reason why it was not converted into one of these after the Final Solution was devised during the Wannsee Conference in 1942 was because Hitler did not want to have such a camp on “German Soil”.
I had a different feeling when I entered Dachau than when I visited Auschwitz and Birkenau. Instead of an ominous feeling, as though tens of thousands had died where I stood, I felt as though something awful was about to happen. Nothing bad happened to me of course (because I am writing this haha), but you could just feel that something bad began on the grounds. And it did, the beginning of the Nazi terror through forced labor camps. Instead of sadness, I felt anger. Dachau is located only a few miles away from Munich, where the Nazi Party began. When I realized how close the camp was to Munich, I immediately thought of the movie called “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”. I now know how the son of the Nazi officer was able to travel to Dachau so easily to visit the boy in Dachau. After walking through the entrance of the camp with the sign “Arbeit Macht Frei”, meaning “Work Makes Freedom”, I went to the sites information desk and asked the lady how the people of Munich could support Hitler when they could easily see how awfully he was treating prisoners at Dachau. The lady told me that they did it out of fear and because the propaganda brainwashed the people and made them think that the prisoners were awful, bad people and not just political prisoners. Even if Hitler used the media to deceive the German people, how could they not think that forced hard labor, basically slavery, was not wrong? I didn’t accept the lady’s answer and went through the memorial to try to find another one. Sadly, I could not find one.
The two most memorable parts of the memorial was the seeing the field where the camp infirmaries were located and seeing a church near the back of the site grounds. Reading about how the medical infirmaries were used more for conducting medical experiments than actually treating camp inmates sent shivers up my spine. I was completely shocked when I saw the church at a memorial site. It was founded in the 1960’s when the memorial site was developed and serves the community of Dachau by performing community service.
I had a different feeling when I entered Dachau than when I visited Auschwitz and Birkenau. Instead of an ominous feeling, as though tens of thousands had died where I stood, I felt as though something awful was about to happen. Nothing bad happened to me of course (because I am writing this haha), but you could just feel that something bad began on the grounds. And it did, the beginning of the Nazi terror through forced labor camps. Instead of sadness, I felt anger. Dachau is located only a few miles away from Munich, where the Nazi Party began. When I realized how close the camp was to Munich, I immediately thought of the movie called “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”. I now know how the son of the Nazi officer was able to travel to Dachau so easily to visit the boy in Dachau. After walking through the entrance of the camp with the sign “Arbeit Macht Frei”, meaning “Work Makes Freedom”, I went to the sites information desk and asked the lady how the people of Munich could support Hitler when they could easily see how awfully he was treating prisoners at Dachau. The lady told me that they did it out of fear and because the propaganda brainwashed the people and made them think that the prisoners were awful, bad people and not just political prisoners. Even if Hitler used the media to deceive the German people, how could they not think that forced hard labor, basically slavery, was not wrong? I didn’t accept the lady’s answer and went through the memorial to try to find another one. Sadly, I could not find one.
The two most memorable parts of the memorial was the seeing the field where the camp infirmaries were located and seeing a church near the back of the site grounds. Reading about how the medical infirmaries were used more for conducting medical experiments than actually treating camp inmates sent shivers up my spine. I was completely shocked when I saw the church at a memorial site. It was founded in the 1960’s when the memorial site was developed and serves the community of Dachau by performing community service.