A visit to the Valley of Darkness It was Thursday 25 July, precisely at 3 o’clock, the sacred hour of Christ’s immolation on the Cross when I, together with a group of twelve people, ably directed by Ms Josette Leonardi, was entering Auschwitz concentration camp, exactly Auschwitz I. I still remember the hazy weather which accompanied us during our particular visit. Perhaps, I dare say, the weather’s haziness itself was a living symbol of the polluting evil which has somehow left its inedible effects within the confines of this abominable place of terror and intimidation. Led by the talented Polish Alicja I started to learn many things. To begin with Auschwitz, the prominent emblem of terror, genocide and holocaust, was founded by the Nazi Germans in 1940, in the suburbs of a Polish city by the name of Oswiecim. The Teutonic occupants united it to the Third Reich while changing its name to Auschwitz. The official name the Nazis gave to this slaughtering venue was Konzentrationslager Auschwitz. The main reason why the Auschwitz camp was erected points to the fact that due to the huge number of arrests of Poles was shockingly on the increase the local prisons were unable to hold such an influx of prisoners. At first Auschwitz was intended to be just another concentration camp of the type the Nazis had been establishing since the early 1930s. It fulfilled this role throughout its existence including its transformation into the largest death camps operated by the Third Reich starting from 1942. Auschwitz death camp is divided into two parts. The first and oldest one is the so-called “main camp”, which later came to be known as “Auschwitz I.” Here the number of prisoners varied from 15,000 up to 20,000. It was built on the grounds and within the same premises of prewar Polish barracks. The second part of the camp consists of Birkenau. In 1944 it was estimated that around 90,000 people were held as prisoners. It is also known as “Auschwitz II”. The latter is the largest part of the Auschwitz complex. The Nazis started erecting it in 1941 on the site of Brzezinka village which is located some three kilometers from Oswiecim. The Polish civilian population was expelled and their houses confiscated and demolished. The major part of the means of mass destruction was erected in Birkenau whereas most of the victims were murdered in this horrendous place. Between 1942 and 1944 the Nazis founded more than 40 sub-camps in order to exploit the prisoners as slave laborers, principally at different spots of German industrial plants and farms. The largest of these camps bear the name “Buna”. Its prisoner population was ten thousand. It was opened by the camp administration in 1942 on the grounds of the Buna-Werke synthetic rubber and fuel plant six kilometers from the Auschwitz camp. On November 1943, the Buna sub-camp became the headquarters of the commandant of Auschwitz III to which other Auschwitz sub-camps were subjected. Life in the camp was anything but human. Auschwitz had a complex of 28 two-storey blocks which were mainly used to house prisoners. The blocks were designed to hold about 700 prisoners each after the second stories were added, but in practice they housed up to 1,200. Long hours of forced labour, mal nutrition and sub-human sanitary conditions were the order of the day in the camps. Prisoners were also physically and mentally tortured by flogging, confinement in block 11 in the main camp, “the post” (‘strappado’ or “hanging torture”), or assignment to the penal company. Although it is impossible to fix with certainty the exact number of victims at Auschwitz it is generally maintained that 1.1 million has lost their lives in the camp. May forgiveness triumphs over evil! Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap May God Almighty bless you in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 12:12:33 +0000
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