Night Will Fall.

It can be really painful to watch this type of documentary. If you prefer to read and not to have to endure the visual aspect, I'd strongly recommend the books by Primo Levi. I've recently finished "If this is a man" which describes his time in Auschwitz - he was "lucky" in the sense that they put him in the section where they worked people to death, rather than immediate consignment to the gas chambers.

 

Auschwitz is a harrowing, sobering place, but Birkenau, christ that's bleak, I found myself walking round there, visualizing the people and the hell they were going through, and it just silences you for hours. Utterly horrific.

 

Birkenau was an extension to Auschwitz, but far more austere. Wooden sheds instead of brick buildings. 6 prisoners to a bunk, a hundred bunks per shed (and hundreds of sheds), with just one tiny wood burner to see them through the winter nights. The trains rolled straight through the gates into the compound so there was zero chance of escape. And, where at Auschwitz they toyed with gassing people, at Birkenau they were killing them a thousand at a time.

At Auschwitz the Germans perfected the art of torture - one cell in particular sticks with me, a tiny cell with a 10" diameter pillar sticking up from the floor, the cell would be flooded so the prisoner had no choice but to stand up, unable to sleep or even sit down for weeks on end - and the first gas chamber was a single-person affair. At Birkenau there were no such delicacies, the prisoners were there purely to die. Wholesale.

 

a mate visited one on a bike tour of eastern Europe. Daves a hard man, he cried. humans can be real pricks.

 

the fella that worked the pumps at garage i worked at had one of these numbers tattooed on his fore head.
BBC News - 'We were not human beings any more'

 

Slightly adrift, but related; my uncle (RAF Bomber Crew) was incarcerated in Stalag Luft 7, Bankau, Upper Silesia.

I am still trying to find out more about the place and although he died a few years ago, he left a written memoir of his time in the war - it seems it wasn't none too pleasant in that place either.

 

auswitch was spread over 40 square kilometres and consisted of several camps used to house workers for several different manufacturing plants. When I say workers I mean slave labour

 

Oradour-Sur-Glane in France is another place that makes your heart sink. For whatever the reason the nazis destroyed the place and everyone in it, men, women, children, they killed pretty much everyone. Walking round it is heartbreaking.

 

Went there this year quite by accident as stayed nearby - harrowing , even wildlife doesn't inhabit the place , it felt like it happened yesterday to and you can still smell the soot