My Visit To Hell

Your email has been sent.

Thanks for recommending The Daily Beast!

X Close

Mandel Ngan, AFP / Getty Images In the wake of President Obama’s visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp today, The Daily Beast’s Christopher Buckley recalls his own horrific trip to Auschwitz with his father 10 years ago and his walk along the Wall of Death.

I went to Auschwitz, about ten years ago, with my late father. There is something about seeing Konzentrationlager Auschwitz that makes you want to give witness. I wrote a long description of the visit, which I’ve never published until now.

Note that the following contains disturbing descriptions.

February 19, 2001

You go through the visitors center and there it is. You’ve seen it in photographs a hundred times, the famous gate: “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Work will set you free. The idea was to be reassuring, unlike the slogan Dante hung over the entrance to his hell, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” Put in an honest day and everything will be all right. Counterproductive to panic the arrivals. Here, and up the road, in Birkenau, they thought through all the details, down to the numbered hooks in the dressing rooms outside the gas chambers. The SS jollied you along. Remember which hook you hang your clothes on so you’ll be able to get find them after the shower. And don’t forget to put your shoes underneath so you’ll be able to get them, too. You’re a shoemaker? Great, we need shoemakers. At Auschwitz, they even had a prisoner orchestra playing inside the gate. It helped keep order. Good for morale, too. How bad could it be, if they greeted you with music?

It’s February and gray. The poplar trees that line the avenues between the cellblocks are bare. The swimming pool—See? We even have a swimming pool!—that was to impress the Red Cross is covered with dirty ice. Crows, gallows. It’s hands-in-the-pockets cold, but would you want to see this in springtime, with blossoms and sweet earth smells?

Our guide is Jarek. Mid-forties, fluent English, dark mustache, knit cap. He grew up in Oswiecim. He speaks precisely, in a low, clear voice without emotion for nearly six hours, except for twice, once outside Block 10 and inside Block 11. We pass under Arbeit Macht Frei. He indicates a grassy strip. “Here is where they gave the welcome speech. They said, ‘You dirty Poles, this isn’t a sanitorium. There’s only one way out—through the chimney of crematorium. Jews, you have three weeks. Priests, one month. Three months for the rest of you.”

Sixty thousand, out of about 1.5 million, survived Auschwitz. If you made it through the first weeks, you stood a chance of making it. Some managed to survive five years, from 1940 to 1945. By contrast, out of 600,000 at Belzec, three people survived.

It feels colder inside the cell blocks, where the exhibits are. There is a blown-up photograph of Himmler viewing Auschwitz’s first inmates, Soviet POWs. Polish political prisoners, the intelligentsia, priests followed. Two years later, with the construction of the much larger Birkenau three kilometers away, the camp became ground zero for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”

Between October 1941 and March 1942, some 10,000 Soviet prisoners died here. Jarek as well as the exhibits use the word “murder” instead of die, or kill, or exterminate. It takes some time before the ear gets used to it, modern speech being less direct.

“The method for murdering the Soviets was in many cases simple,” Jarek says. “Put them in a field, surround them with barbed wire and leave them.” Some became so resigned from hunger that they would climb themselves onto the wagons of corpses. There was cannibalism. In Thadeusz Borowski’s short story, “The Supper,” a group of Russians who have tried to escape are lined up, arms tied behind them with barbed wire, and shot point-blank through the back of the head in front of a crowd of starving prisoners. The prisoners clamor and rush forward and must be dispersed with clubs. “The following day … a Jew from Estonia who was helping me haul steel bars tried to convince me all day that human brains are, in fact, so tender you can eat them raw.” Borowski was at Auschwitz. He survived and later put his head in a gas stove at the age of 29.

View as Single Page