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 The grounds and buildings of the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau camps are open to visitors in their
entirety, with the exception of several blocks in Auschwitz I that house the
administration, Museum departments, and storage. There is generally access to
all barracks at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
The duration of a visit is determined
solely by the individual interests and needs of the visitors. As a
minimum,
however, at least one-and-a-half hours each should be reserved for the
grounds
and exhibitions of Auschwitz I and for the
Birkenau site. It is necessary to visit both parts of the camp,
Birkenau and Auschwitz, in order to acquire a proper sense of the
place that has become the symbol of the Holocaust. Auschwitz
I is where the
Nazis opened the first Auschwitz camps for men and women, where they carried
out the first experiments at using Zyklon
B to put people to
death, where they murdered the first mass transports of Jews, where they
conducted the first criminal experiments on prisoners, where they carried out
most of the executions by shooting, where the central jail for prisoners from
all over the camp complex was located in Block No. 11, and where the camp
commandant's office and most of the SS offices were located. From here, the
camp administration directed the further expansion of the camp complex.
In the Auschwitz
II-Birkenau camp,
everything happened on a magnified scale. This is where the Nazis erected most
of the machinery of mass extermination in which they murdered approximately one
million
European Jews. At
the same time, Birkenau was the largest concentration camp (with nearly 300
primitive barracks, most of them wooden). Over a hundred thousand prisoners at
a time were here: Jews,
Poles, Roma, and others. The site of this camp contains places that are still full of human
ashes; the greatest portion of what remains of the Auschwitz
complex is here. The vastness of the space, the primitive barracks for the
prisoners, the ruins or remains of other structures, and the miles of camp
fence and roads give a full sense of what cannot be conveyed in words: infinite
baseness, cruelty, and human criminality, and the specific camp architecture
that served one purpose alone: the destruction of human beings. |
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