CHAPTER V

REFLECTIONS ON AUSCHWITZ AND FINAL THOUGHTS

While conducting research in the Bioethics Research Library at Georgetown University, I kept arriving at a singular thought.

No matter how many survivor testimonials or historical works I studied, I still did not have a complete understanding of Auschwitz.

I felt it was important to personally gain a better perspective of the horror that was forced upon millions of innocent men, women, and children.

After careful consultation, I ultimately resolved that I would visit Auschwitz.

Failure to do so would lead to regret over missing the opportunity to experience such an important historical location.

My attempted arrival to the small town of Oswiecim, Poland was frustrating and postponed.

Due to unattended luggage in the Paris airport and a raging ice storm near Katowice, I was stranded in Prague for longer than I had anticipated.

Thankfully, I was able to board the final flight out of Prague once the weather had cleared and successfully landed in Poland.

Finally, after settling in a hotel in downtown Krakow for the evening, I embarked on the seventy minute bus ride to Oswiecim.

Exploring the small town of Oswiecim was quite interesting.

It is a quiet town with very little tourism.

Rather derelict and downtrodden, it represented a town whose vibrant days were long past and whose prospects for prosperity were only tied to either the tourism of Auschwitz or one of the few remaining automobile factories located on the town's outskirts.

Even the ancient castle was rather small and unimpressive.

However, I experienced an uneasy feeling while touring the Main Market Square and walking along the Sola River.

Somewhere beneath the town's blue collar surface, there exists an underlying shame.

Even though I was present sixty six years after Auschwitz's liberation by the Russian Army, I could still feel the effects of the Nazi occupation.

By gazing out from the restaurant where I took my lunch, I could see the former aristocratic home that housed Heinrich Himmler during his visit to Auschwitz.

I recognized that this is not some abstract town several thousand miles.

Rather, this is the site where the terrible crimes of the Nazis occurred.

I am standing in the same Market Square frequented by Nazi officials such as Himmler, Wirths, Hoss, and Josef Mengele.

The weather over the course of my trip prior to Auschwitz was rather pleasant for a January in Eastern Europe.

The temperature hung around 30 degrees Fahrenheit and the sun shone on most days.

Conversely, the morning I visited Auschwitz was extremely cold, and an eerie fog hung over the grounds.

As I stood on Auschwitz's front lawn looking into the main camp, the fog ever so slowly lifted and I could make out the chimney stacks and brick barracks.

Before long, the full view of Auschwitz I was revealed.

I stood there for a few moments, soaking in the weathered brick buildings and picturing the camp's former inhabitants.

The structures erected in Auschwitz I, which stood on the sight of reconstructed Polish army barracks, are quite monotonous.

Each building encompasses three floors, and many come equipped with basements which were used for a variety of activities, mainly torture.

After viewing a short film in the museum directly adjacent to the camp's entrance, I entered Auschwitz I beneath the sign reading "Arbeit Macht Frei", or "Work Brings Freedom"

Once I stepped into the main camp and stood near where the orchestra was mandated to play twice a day, the atmosphere changed again.

While approaching the camp and standing outside the gates, there was a somber feel in the air.

Now, however, the environment felt even more sinister.

Any pretense I held regarding my ability to emotionally handle this experience quickly vanished.

A sensational wave of emotion rushed through me as we began our guided tour.

Each brick building stood as a monument to the victims and as I toured the grounds I couldn't help but notice the guard towers, barbed wire, and the deadly "no man's land"

These three locations provided the opportunity for so many lost souls to commit suicide, either by walking into the electrified wires or by being shot for entering "no man's land"

I soon noticed a simple structure, comprised of a steel bar held horizontal atop three wooden posts.

This structure's sole purpose was for hanging prisoners.
Soon thereafter I stood at the front door of Block 10, the medical experimentation block where Josef Mengele conducted his gruesome trials.

While we were not permitted to enter this specific building, it was quite emotional to be standing at the precise location where my thesis subject had caused so much grief and suffering.

Not long after, I passed the infirmary, previously noted as being the waiting room of the gas chambers.

One of the blocks that we did enter and tour was Block 11, the main camp's prison within the prison.

This is the location where inmates were severely punished for alleged crimes against the SS.

In the basement of Block 11 were a few distinct methods of punishment.

In a room known as the "starvation room", a prisoner was simply locked inside and denied food or water until the inmate died.

Across the hall is where the "standing room" was located.

Through this form of punishment, four prisoners were locked in an extremely tight space and forced to stand for the entire evening as the space was too small for even one prisoner to sit down.

After spending all night standing in this cell, the inmates were then required to participate in the grueling sixteen hour work day, only to return to the standing cell the following night.

Finally, Block 11 housed the "suffocation room"

A prisoner was locked in this air tight space until they had used all of the available oxygen and suffocated to death.
Oftentimes these prisoners were hanged with their hands tied behind their back for hours, resulting in the dislocation of the shoulders and excruciating pain.

Sometimes SS men would light a candle in the room in order to expedite the suffocation process.

The next Block we entered housed a catalogue of discarded personal belongings.

I walked through rooms stacked to the ceiling with suitcases labeled from all over Europe.

The next room displayed a collection of prosthetic limbs, and yet another room held potato sacks full of shorn hair, which was converted to rope or used as mattress filler.

The final room we entered held an allotment of Zyklon-B canisters.

There were too many canisters to count, even though this was only a small representation of the amount of Zyklon-B used in Auschwitz.

It is important to note that each canister represented the death of roughly two thousand innocent men, women, and children.

My final destination in Auschwitz I was located in the section of the camp which housed the SS.

Located in the open, near the converted bunker, stands the gallows where Rudolph Hess was hanged in 1947.

Apropos to his punishment, Hess' extravagant Auschwitz villa was within sight.

After departing the gallows, we entered the converted bunker where the first Polish and Russian victims of Nazi gassing occurred.

The room was dark, cold, and quite cramped.

At that moment I understood that this room was the genesis of the Auschwitz genocide.

This is where the Nazis successfully experimented with Zyklon-B, and the adjacent ovens were the first to turn Auschwitz victims into ash.

The camp of Auschwitz II - Birkenau is located roughly two kilometers away from the main camp, and thus after a short bus ride I arrived just outside the infamous Birkenau gate.

The skies had cleared by this point, and it was quiet as I walked through the gate into the camp.

I immediately noticed the immense size of the camp.

It stretched as far as I could see, extending to the distant tree line.

Most of the wood which comprised the barracks has been removed, taken away by Poles returning to the area and rebuilding their homes after the war.

All that remained were innumerable rows of chimneys.

However, a few complete bunks remained, and the inside of the barracks were not fit for livestock.

The long side of the barrack was full of tri-level bunks, and each level held upwards of 6 prisoners.

In the center of the barrack ran the concrete fire tract, where the inmates would cook their food and hopelessly attempt to keep warm.

However, it was straightforward to see why so many prisoners froze to death during the harsh Polish winters.

I then entered the prisoners' latrine barrack, which was composed solely of concrete slabs with circular holes.

These latrines offered absolutely no privacy or hygienic amenities.

Finally, I walked past a transport car at the selection ramp and approached the gas chambers and crematoria.

I was able to observe the crematorium which was destroyed by the Sonderkommando in the Autumn of 1944, which was never rebuilt.

I reminded myself that I was making a similar walk as those inmates who were not able to avoid selection.

What I was seeing very closely resembled the last sights the prisoners ever saw before they were gassed.

I am very thankful that I had the opportunity to travel to Auschwitz.

The experience was emotionally stirring and will forever shape how I experience life.

Furthermore, the knowledge I gained from being on the Auschwitz soil allowed me a deeper perspective while writing this thesis.

Each of the following photographs was taken during my visit to Auschwitz in January of 2011.








Josef Mengele does not, by himself, encompass the atrocities committed at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

He is, however, widely considered the most infamous Nazi doctor employed anywhere within the Third Reich.

Prior to conducting research on this thesis, I was aware of Mengele's reputation as a gruesome and evil doctor but was not cognizant of his specific activities.

In an attempt to unlock the programmability of genetics, Josef Mengele experimented and operated on countless victims, mainly children.

He eschewed his professional and social ethics in an attempt to advance his academic career, and relished the power he held over the prisoners of Auschwitz.

Analyzing and documenting Mengele's scientific research was emotionally draining, but I am glad to have had the experience.
Furthermore, in conclusion, Josef Mengele's experiments were so heinous and so evil that no good could ever have come from his trials.

No matter how one assesses Mengele's pseudo scientific merit or analyzes his results through an ethical spectrum, only one conclusion can be reached.

This author strongly believes that the research conducted by Josef Mengele was professionally and philosophically unethical, and any use of his results would likewise be impermissible.