By Scot and Maurine Proctor

Auschwitz was liberated by armies of the Soviet Union on January 27, 1945, 60 years ago.  In remembrance of those who died in agony in this death camp, we dedicate this essay.

Some of this material is from the websites for the United States Holocaust Museum and another called Auschwitz Alphabet. The website for the Holocaust Museum contains footage from the day of liberation as well as the testimony of survivors.  Most of the material is from Elie Wiesel’s book Night.

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"Why would you want to visit Auschwitz?" our friend asked us.  We went because we couldn't help but go.  We went to remember how prejudice explodes into hate and butchery.

And because we went with a camera, we prayed that we would have perfect weather for the shoot. 

It was perfect.  A dismal, unrelentingly gray day to match the heavy spirit that lingers like a pall over this complex of death. 

We felt pain everywhere; we could feel it in the mortar, in the bricks, in the barbed wire.  It was a place we couldn't smile. 

We felt to whisper while we walked the foreboding streets, almost catching the sounds of lives snuffed out, the cries of children snatched from their parents, the silence of the beaten ones led to the shower from which they would emerge only as smoke in the sky.

click on photos to enlarge

The surrounding woods are too green and peaceful to hold these dismal secrets. How must it have been sixty years ago when a division of the Soviet army penetrated this forest and came upon the unexpected horrors of Auschwitz?

"Combat-hardened soldiers were unprepared for what they found in the camps: stacks of dead bodies lying around, and barracks filled with dead and dying prisoners. The stench of death was everywhere. Although the Germans had attempted to evacuate them, the camps still housed thousands of emaciated and diseased prisoners, a sight that shocked the liberating soldiers.

"Those prisoners who survived resembled skeletons because of forced labor and lack of food. Many were so weak that they could hardly move. Disease remained an ever present danger and the liberators had to burn down many of the camps to prevent the spread of epidemics," according to the United States Holocaust Museum web site.

Auschwitz, in Poland's lovely countryside, 37 miles west of Krakow near the prewar German-Polish border, was the deadliest of the concentration camps, a sprawl of complexes, that killed Jews with industrial precision, cremated them on the spot, and bagged their hair to be woven into tailor's lining.  These are aerial pictures taken by the Allied forces showing the extent of the camp that was the original Auschwitz and then the deadly extension called Birkenau. 

"The same day I saw my first horror camp, I visited every nook and cranny. I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda," said General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Another eyewitness, Stuart C. Nichols said, "On every day since I first saw Auschwitz, I have wept."

Prisoners of Auschwitz entered through a gate famous for its irony. Here is a detail of the entrance gate.

Major Rudolf Hoss erected the gate which carried the sign "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Brings Freedom), which was, of course, a mocking lie.  In Auschwitz, the goal was for work, combined with starvation, systematic cruelty, and sickness, to bring death.

They say that Hoss seems not to have intended the sign as a mockery, nor even to have intended it literally, as a false promise that those who worked to exhaustion would eventually be released, but rather as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom---a sick philosophy.

Click here to go to Part 2 of Remembering the Dark Night of Auschwitz