An inviting field hides its menacing secret, this sturdy tree locked inside by barbed wire like years ago. This fence line is the extreme end of the main Birkenau camp. We are facing west.
This is where people just off the trains were brought and told they were about to receive a disinfecting shower, and afterward… work. This is the last of the world they would see. This is the last moment in the open air.
“Off the tour path, this field at the extreme north-west boundary of Birkenau, contains the remains of countless innocent souls, guilty of the crime of existing in the wrong place at the wrong time, merely being, just that… living.
I absentmindedly kicked at something in the ground.
It turned out to be a bone, a cervical vertebra, one of the few things I could not bring myself to photograph.
I covered it quickly, lest I cause it more pain, and said a prayer.”
Rear of Birkenau: The Final Moments
This fence line is the extreme end of the main Birkenau camp. We are facing west. Scroll a bit past the guard tower to view the back end of the Memorial with its flag poles for all the countries who’s citizens lost their lives here. Scroll past the memorial and we are at the back end of Krematorium II.
Stuart Nichols visited Auschwitz in 1993, winding to the end of Birkenau:
“It was a pleasant walk for a while, refreshing and lovely, serene and engaging. I couldn’t help but notice the trees and the quiet and the play of light coming through the canopy. But my mood was changed in an instant by the smell of damp ash.
It took a minute to sink in. But there was no mistaking the odor. It was so strong I instinctively looked around for the remains of a bonfire. There were none. Anywhere.
I spent a good twenty minutes searching up and down a fifty meter stretch and poking into the woods on either side of the road. The smell was constant and it was everywhere. It wasn’t borne along by a breeze, either. It rose from the ground on which I stood.
For reasons I’ll never know, I stepped off the road and uprooted a handful of weeds. They came up easily, roots and all. At least eighteen inches of roots slipped out of the ground as though it was water.
I stood there and stared at them. What was clinging to those fine threads was not soil but ash.”
