In our trip to Poland we have seen, near the town of Oświęcim and the village of Brzezinka, the concentration and extermination camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, the largest in the Third Reich, where the Nazi commanded by Adolf Hitler systematically starved, tortured and murdered 1,5 million people from 24 countries, among them a great number of Jews. It was created by Himmler in 1940 and directed by Rudolf Höss. There are many tragical evidences, preserved in the conditions in which were in 1947, when the museum was founded: fortified walls, barbed wire, electrified fence, platforms, roll call square, sectors of wooden and bricks barracks for men and women with cells and small latrines, deposits for the belongins of the deportees, the Russian graveyard, gallows, false hospitals (wainting rooms to the gas), gas chambers, five cremation ovens, false showers, laboratories for experiments on people, Gestapo camps, entrance gates, railroads, a barrack (work camp for the Russian soldiers) where was for the first time used the gas Zyclon B for extermination, a wall (Death Wall) where were shot 20000 prisoners, bunkers, a barrack where are 70 tunes of hairs, 48000 pairs of shoes, glasses, brushes and dentures. There is also the terrible writing on the entrance arch: “Arbeit macht frei”, that means “The work makes free”.

I was really schocked by the tragical evidences of the camp, but it's absolutely worth to be visited for more understing the horrors of the genocide. However I think it don't justifies the inscription because, in my opinion, tragical war places like this (or like Hiroshima or Robben Island) can't be in a list where are inscribed the treasures of the humanity and of the nature. Anyway it represents well all the concentrations camp because it is the most important.

Photo: Oœwiêcim - Entrance gate and barracks of the concentration camp of Auschwitz