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In Auschwitz-Birkenau There Can Be Seen…

In Auschwitz-Birkenau there can be seen forty thousand pairs of shoes piled along a long corridor. There is a tangled mound of spectacles, a room stacked with enamel utensils, and two tons of piled hair shaved from forty thousand people(mostly women), used for mattresses and fabric.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau there can be seen stacks of Zyclon-B canisters, only five of which were needed to kill two thousand naked Jews stuffed at once into the gas chamber.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen the tracks bringing to the unloading ramp trains of ten to twelve cattle cars, each jammed with eighty people who rode for two or three or five days without the doors being opened once.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau there can be seen several brick punishment cells, each smaller than two phone booths, in which were packed five people standing for two days, and a wall against which people were executed two at a time at close range.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen photos of one doctor, standing before two lines of men and women, flicking one hand in either one of two directions, toward either the gas chamber or forced labor and starvation. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, seventy-five to eighty percent from each cattle car were sent directly to the gas chamber.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen two long paths to the gas chambers, upon which people walked immediately after long rides in boxcars, toward their deaths within three hours. There can be seen the ruins of the four massive brick gas chambers toward which they walked(blown up by the Germans as the Russians approached), and the underground hall in which two thousand Jews stripped at once.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen one small gas chamber and crematoria, which was later used as a bomb shelter for German soldiers and thus preserved.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen one fine house, in which lived the commandant Rudolph Hoess with his wife and five children, and which was filled with looted Jewish furnishings and prisoner servants.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau there can be seen rows of barracks holding seven hundred people each, filled with rows of three-tiered bunks, into each of which squeezed up to five people.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen the arrival photos of Hungarian Jews, 430,000 of whom were killed in fifty-six days as the allies advanced from east and west.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau there can be seen, near the ruined gas chambers, memorial plaques in twenty-three languages. There is visible one pit of human ash, filled with water that is covered with pond scum. And there can be seen by the pit two Jews saying Kaddish.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau there can be seen one specially-built gallows, near the old Gestapo interrogation center, upon which, in one tiny, infinitesimal drop of justice, the Polish government hanged Rudoph Hoess in 1947.