Visiting the Death Camps from the voice of Kaitlyn Yutrzenka

Greetings from Skoczów!  We are at the end of our first full Polish day, and it has been busy. 

After our morning devotionals and breakfast, we got on a bus and went to Auschwitz, where we were able to tour both Auschwitz I (the mother camp) and Auschwitz II (Birkenau).  Our tour guide, Monika, was wonderful and she knew so much about the camps.  She told us that she had grown up near Auschwitz I and that her parents had also worked at Auschwitz.  Her grandfather is also an ex-prisoner of a Polish death camp, so it was evident how important the history was to her and her family.

I’m struggling to find words to describe the death camps themselves.  It was staggering to see everything that we saw and to know of the horrific things that happened there.  The camps were massive, especially Birkenau, and yet from the pictures and the stories we know that they still weren’t big enough to accommodate the number of people that were being held prisoner there. 

In the past few days, we have been studying the book of Romans, and one verse that I kept thinking about was Romans 2:14-15: “Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law.  They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times defending them.”  In a way, I tend to associate the law with morals, and somehow it seems that the people in charge of the death camps had no morals to guide them.  The Commander of Auschwitz lived right next to the gas chamber with his wife and five children – not even a quarter mile away – and his kids were right there with him seeing all of this right outside their windows.

The conditions that these people were made to live in were deplorable.  Sleeping in bunk beds stacked 2-3 high, often times with 6 or more people sleeping on each level.  One of the prison cells that we saw held 16 people.  It contained four small rooms about 3 ft by 3 ft.  Each of those rooms held 4 people, giving them only enough room to stand, sometimes for days on end, with the only access to those rooms being through a small door on the floor that they had to crawl through.  Even the train cars that were used to transport people to the camps were so small, and yet they still held about 100 people apiece, plus the luggage that people brought with them. 

I think the part of the tour that made it so real to me was all of the displays they had.  When prisoners were brought into the camps, they were shaved, and the Germans kept all of the hair.  Monika told us that about 7 tons of hair was saved, and based on the 2 tons that we were able to see, I can’t even imagine the full amount.  They also had display cases with the luggage, shoes and hairbrushes of people coming into the camps.  One case that really hit me though, was the case containing all of the dishes that people had brought to the camps.  Monika told us that it was because these people truly thought that they were coming to Auschwitz to start a new life, and found that they were greatly mistaken.

As difficult as it was to see the camps, I am also glad we were able to do it.  It gives us a better understanding of what the people in Poland feel about it, because for them, World War II wasn’t really that long ago.  And like Domi was saying when we got back, it is important to see that and truly understand the history.

Update on our luggage: it was dropped off at our hotel a little before 9 o’clock tonight, for which we were all very grateful.  Some of the girls from the Polish youth group were kind enough to let us borrow some of their clothes, which we all greatly appreciated, but it will be good to be able to wear something from home again tomorrow, especially when we are so far away.

We are all missing home, but we are also very excited to see where God and the next couple weeks bring us!  Tomorrow we will be spending the day setting up camp with the Polish team and we are all excited for that!

Signing off from Poland,

Kaitlyn