Auschwitz 1, were it not for the barbed wire, could be looked upon as a cozy cookie cutter neighborhood. However it is not, it's the original Auschwitz concentration camp in the area and many of the originally unspeakable acts were committed here. This part of the camp is mainly a museum now, containing a lot of photos and documents from the days of the camp. It also contains countless items that once belonged to the millions of prisoners. One of the places we couldn't photograph was this room filled with hair, shaved off women after they arrived to be used as fabric for the Nazi soldiers. What really shocked me here was in the giant displays of wads of matted hair, there was a single small blond braid, bigger braid were used in a separate display, but this one was all alone, and probably a child's.
Auschwitz Birkenau was built as a death camp and you can tell. From afar it's just one giant structure and then barbed wire with rows of barracks. Within this camp a lot of buildings were burnt down to try and hide the crimes committed but a lot of the bricks remained. From the barracks that were burned all that remained were chimney's.
Between the camps you could buy flowers to place any where in the museum or camp that you wanted. The most amazing sight I saw was six flowers displayed as the Star of David, easily overlooked if you were just walking by and thought it was another pile of flowers.
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| Auschwitz Birkenau |
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