To understand what binds these seemingly incompatible words, a museum, a concentration camp, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Auschwitz, it is necessary to realize one of the most terrible and tragic periods in the history of mankind.
Auschwitz - a concentration camp complex, which during the war was located near the town of Oswiecim.Poland lost the town in 1939, when the outbreak of hostilities, it was annexed to Germany and was called Auschwitz.
Birkenau - the second German death camp, located in the village of Brzezinka where were tortured over a million people.
In 1946 the Polish authorities decided to establish a museum in the open air on the territory of Auschwitz, and in 1947 it was opened.The museum is included in the UNESCO World Heritage list.Museum of Auschwitz is visited by about two million people a year.
first Auschwitz concentration camp Auschwitz was in Poland in the south side of forty-five kilometers from the city of Krakow.It was the largest death camp for the mass killings.There were killed from 1940 to 1945, 1.1 million people, among whom 90% were people of Jewish nationality.Auschwitz has become synonymous with genocide, cruelty, misanthropy.
becoming Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler promised the German people regain its former power, and at the same time to deal with dangerous racial enemy - the Jews.In 1939, part of the Wehrmacht invaded Poland.More than 3 million Jews were on the territory controlled by the German army.
In 1940 construction of the first concentration camp for political prisoners of the Auschwitz-1 at the site of the former barracks of the Polish Army.Immediately sent to the camp people are the elite of Polish doctors, politicians, lawyers, scientists.By the fall of 1941, a political prisoner joined 10 thousand Red Army prisoners of war.
Conditions of detention in Auschwitz
Auschwitz museum stores as evidence secretly painted drawings on the walls of the barracks, testifying about the conditions of detention and living in the camp.
prisoners huddled in the twenty-four brick barracks where the two slept in the beds extremely narrow.The diet was a piece of bread and a bowl of watery soup.
Any violated the camp system waited for brutal beating by prison guards.Considering the Polish representatives of an inferior race, the guard could humiliate, hit or kill.The problem of Auschwitz - to sow terror among the general Polish population.The whole area around the perimeter of the camp was fenced double fence with barbed wire, connected to the electric current.
more control over the prisoners was made prisoners-criminals who were brought from German camps.They were called - capo.These were people who did not know of sympathy or compassion.
Life in the camp straight depended on the distribution of jobs.Work was in great demand in the area.Work on the street, under the blows of the Kapos - a death sentence.Any offense - it is the way of death in the block № 11. Arrested, keeping in the basement, beaten, starved, or simply left to die.They could send the night in one of four stationary cameras.Auschwitz Museum has preserved the torture chamber.
There's also located chamber for political prisoners.They were brought from all over the region.Auschwitz Museum has preserved the wall of death, which is located in the courtyard of the block.There were executed 5 thousand people a day.Patients who have got to the hospital, but had not managed to get to his feet quickly, killing the doctor-SS man.It was believed to feed only those who could work.In two years, more than ten thousand Polish prisoners claimed the lives of the future museum of Auschwitz.Poland will never forget these crimes.
second Auschwitz
In October 1941, near the village of Birkenau, the Nazis established a second camp, originally intended for the prisoners of the Soviet army.Osventsium-2 was 20 times and totaled 200 barracks for prisoners.Now part of the wooden barracks were destroyed, but retained the stone tube furnaces of Auschwitz Museum.Accepted winter in Berlin decision on the Jewish question, change the target destination.Now Auschwitz-2 was intended for the mass murder of Jews.
But first he had a significant role in the massacres did not play and was used as a place for the deportation of Jews from the captured southern, northern, Scandinavian and Balkan countries.Later it became the largest killing machine.
summer of 1942, with all of occupied Europe began arriving at Birkenau Jews and other prisoners.Their landing was performed in six hundred meters from the main gate.Later, to accelerate the process kills the rails were laid to the barracks themselves.Arriving passengers pass a selection process that determines who will work, and who - in the gas chamber, and then - in the furnaces of Auschwitz.
folded possessions doomed were divided into two groups: men and women with children.After some time to decide their fate.Some able-bodied young prisoners was sent to a labor camp, and the majority of people, including children, pregnant women, the elderly and the disabled - into the gas chambers, and then - in the furnace of the crematorium.The very same selection process was captured unknown SS officer in the form of photographic material, although an order from above is forbidden to remove the mass killings.
When 1942 arrived at Birkenau Jews from all over Europe, in the camp there was only one gas chamber, which was installed in the cottage.But the appearance in 1944 of four new gas chambers turned Osventsium-2 in the worst place of mass murder.
Performance crematoria reached a thousand people a day.Although a few days before the arrival of the Red Army at Auschwitz furnaces were blown up by the Germans, remained surviving one of the tubes of the furnace of the crematorium.She was prezhneu preserved in the museum.Poland intends to restore and wooden huts that were burnt or destroyed over time.
Survival in Auschwitz
survival in the camp depended on a combination of different factors: self-preservation instinct, connections, luck, cunning in naming nationality, age and profession.But the main condition for survival is the ability to organize all that is connected with barter: sell, buy, receive food.At the same time it was important to get into a good working group, for example in the sector of B2G.
There were belongings of new prisoners.Naturally, the most valuable dispatched to Germany, but working here, it was with great risk to their lives something of value hidden in things - gold ring, diamond, money - to exchange for food at a camp the black market or use forbribing the SS.
Work makes free
All prisoners passed through the main entrance to the death camp, see what is written on the gates of Auschwitz.In German it means "Work makes you free".
What is written on the gates of Auschwitz - this is the height of cynicism and lies.Never work in a concentration camp did not release the man was originally sentenced to death.Only death itself, or in rare cases - escape.
first gas chambers
first experiments with gas chambers at Auschwitz, held in September 1941.Then, hundreds of Soviet and Polish prisoners were sent to the basement of the block 11 and were killed by poison - cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon on - B. Now the camp of Auschwitz, which is no different from many other camps, took the first step to become an important element in the solution of the Jewish question.
When the deportation of Jews, ostensibly for resettlement to the east of newcomers drove in the former premises of ammunition depots, which are located away from the main camp.Fated said that they were brought to work, thereby helping Germany;but first need to be disinfected.The victims were sent to the gas chamber, equipped with a shower.The crystals of Zyklon - B then covered through a hole in the roof.
evacuation of prisoners
In 1944, the territory of Auschwitz was a network of camps, guiding daily for more than ten thousand people at the construction site of the German chemical plant.Work in more than forty camps has been used in various fields: construction, agriculture, industry.
By mid-1944 the Third Reich was threatened.Alarmed by the rapid advance of the Soviet troops, the Nazis dismantled and blew up the crematorium to hide traces of the crimes.The camp was deserted, the evacuation of the prisoners.January 17, 1945 on Polish roads has passed 50 thousand prisoners.They were persecuted in Germany.Thousands of barefoot and scantily clad people died from the cold in a way.Exhausted and lagging behind the column guards shot prisoners.It was a death march prisoners of Auschwitz.Concentration camp museum stores in the corridors of the barracks portraits of many of them.
Liberation
A few days after the evacuation of the prisoners at Auschwitz included Soviet troops.At the camp it was found about seven thousand half-dead prisoners, exhausted and sick.They just did not shoot: not enough time.They are living witnesses of the genocide of the Jewish people.
In the battles for the liberation of the Auschwitz killed 231 soldiers of the Red Army.All they found peace in a mass grave of the city.
They survived Auschwitz
17 January marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Auschwitz.But even today, still alive prisoners of the camp, survived the horrors of genocide.
Zdizslava Volodarchik: "I found the hut where kept me and other children.Bedbugs, lice, rats.But I survived Auschwitz. "
Claudia Kovacic: "I spent three years in the camp.Constant hunger and cold.But I survived Auschwitz. "
From June 1940 to January 1945 were destroyed 400 thousand children.This should not happen again.
Exposing Genocide criminals
Rudolf Hess, commandant of Auschwitz, devoted to the Polish Supreme People's Court and was hanged in Auschwitz at the site of the camp headquarters of the Gestapo in 1947.
Josef Kramer, commandant of Birkenau, was hanged in a German prison in 1945.
Richard Baer, the last commandant of Auschwitz, died in 1960 while awaiting trial.
Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, to avoid punishment, he died in Brazil in 1979.
Trials of war criminals continued in the 60s and 70s of the 20th century.Many of them are punished.
