Auschwitz Trip Pt 1 - Auschwitz ("Like a Rose, Trampled on the Ground...")

 The famous sign of Auschwitz.  "Work will make you free."

 A view of the barracks from a window reflection.

 The length of the camp.

 Someone had hung a stuck a flower in the gate, a reminder of beauty in the face of death.

 A lamp with the barracks number.

 The door to one of the barracks.

 The view out of a barracks window.  The focus in the glass gives it a cool feel.

 They had a case full of glasses that were taken away from people.  When you start to realize that each pair represents a person, the number of people who died finally becomes more than just a number. 

 Another case was full of prosthetics and braces. The owners of these would have been unfit for work, and so would have gone straight to the gas chambers.

 An overwhelming ammount of dishes and cups brought by people who believed they were simply being resettled.

 Both sides of this hallway are made up of cases holding shoes of those who were sent to the gas chambers.

 The shere ammount of shoes is almost impossible to take in.  But it isn't realizing that these were real people that really gets to you.  It's when you realize that this was done to people by other people.

 The reflection on the glass was completely unintentional, but it gives the picture a surreal feel.

 There was something incredibly haunting about that tiny white shoe. 

 Most of the barracks have been turned into museums, and many of the hallways are full of pictures of prisoners who were held in the camp.  Some of them were lucky enough to survive.  Most of them were not.

 A few of the pictures are accompanied by flowers left by friends or family in memory of those who have died.

 The hard bunks inmates were forced to sleep on, usually about three to a bunk.

 There is a wall in the camp where death sentences were typically carried out.  Now it is a memorial, hosting many tokens left by visitors to the camp. 

 Someone had left this rose at the wall, and it had been buried in the snow.  I was kneeling to take a picture and saw a hint of pink sticking out.  So I dug it up and realize it was a rose.  It reminded me of the song- "Crucified, laid behind a stone.  You lived to die, rejected and alone.  Like a rose trampled on the ground, you took the fall and thought of me above all."  Suddenly I understood that image as never before.  So I pulled the rose off of the ground and placed it in a nook in the wall where no one can step on it. 

A group of people comes to learn about what happened here two generations ago.  We can not afford to forget.