An awful place

One of the barracks where forced labourers were housed at Birkenau.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau was designated by Heinrich Himmler, who was the Reichsführer and Germany's Minister of the Interior, as the place of the "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe". From spring 1942 until the fall of 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over Nazi-occupied Europe. The camp's first commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified after the war at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three million people had died there (2.5 million gassed, and 500,000 from overwork, disease and starvation).

This place has haunted me ever since, as a child in the early 1950s, reading about it in the newspapers. I'm glad that I finally managed to see it for myself but it was a truly grueling day. This is one of the very few photographs that I could bear to take.