On January 24th 2024, Year 13 Psychology students had the opportunity to visit the Auschwitz – Birkenau memorial & museum; a complex of concentration & extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. Our tour guide was extremely informative and shared many overwhelming facts; 75% of the people going to Auschwitz were killed or died from the extremely poor living conditions in the camp, and 20% of those who died were children.
We went through the original entrance gate into Auschwitz which read “Arbeit Macht Frei” translating to ‘work sets you free.’ Many displays have been set up at the camp in attempt to demonstrate the devastation that happened there, for example, a model of the gas chambers had been created, demonstrating how these were disguised as changing rooms to encourage people that they were going to be taken for a shower; even the gas chamber itself was made to look like it had shower vents at the top. One of the most significant parts of the tour was the rooms with the belongings that were taken from them as soon as they arrived. Floor to ceiling cases contained shoes, suitcases, kitchenware, Jewish prayer shawls, prosthetic limbs & crutches and pairs of glasses. We were also showed inside the camp’s prison which was known as ‘unlucky Block 11.’ Some of the cells were basic rooms whilst others included standing cells – a square meter cell that would have prisoned up to 6 people at one time.
There is also a book containing the names of 4 million Jews who died in the war, out of the total 6 million – the book itself fills an entire room. It really puts into perspective how many innocent lives were lost. In the afternoon, we visited Birkenau. Birkenau was one of the main locations for gas chambers, but the Nazis had attempted to destroy the evidence of them, leaving remainders of the ruins around the site. Here, we saw the conditions that the prisoners of war had been suffering in. The camp contained rows of wooden barracks which would house hundreds of people as the camps were severely overcrowded. The children’s barracks had decorations of paintings that included schools, to remind them of good things that they valued. We walked down the platform where the trains would have brought in people for the selection process; where the officers decided whether they were ‘useful’ enough for work in the camps, or whether they were ‘useless.’ If they were useless, they were sent straight to the gas chambers. There is now a memorial behind the gas chambers that includes a variety of plaques and stone blocks with the inscription “To the memory of the men, woman and children who fell victim to the Nazi genocide. Here lie their ashes. May their souls rest in peace.”
Written by students Rowan Cross and Amy Smith




