Seodaemun Prison, Korea
Concentration Camps at Auschwitz, Poland
The former capital of Poland, Krakow, was a beautiful city that was the center of politics, culture, and economy for 600 years. However, there is a historic site located 55 kilometers from Krakow where unimaginably cruel tragedies of racial discrimination, genocide, death by gas chambers, and human experiments occurred.
Auschwitz was created in 1940 by German Nazis, in the suburbs of Oswiecim, a Polish city that was annexed to the Third Reich by the Nazis. The Auschwitz complex was composed of the main camp (Auschwitz I) and Birkenau camp (Auschwitz II). The main camp was the first and oldest camp in the Auschwitz complex, which held around 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners. Birkenau camp was the largest part of the Auschwitz complex, which held over 90,000 prisoners in 1944. At least 1.1 million Jewish people, including children and young people, were killed in the gas chambers immediately or as soon as they arrived. An average of only 20 percent of the prisoners were kept alive as slave labor.
There is a two-story gateway that was once used by the Nazi military, but it is now used as an information desk, bookstore, and cafe. If you move 100 meters from the gateway, there is the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camps, where you can see the traces of its past such as wire entanglements, checkpoints, railways, and outposts with machine guns. In addition, in the front of the entrance, you can see the words “ARBEIT MACHT FREI,” which literally means you can be freed if you work.
In the exhibition hall, there is a memorial sculpture for those who were murdered in the concentration camps, where pictures of prisoners including women and young children are displayed. Next to the exhibition hall, there is the former residence hall of horrible living conditions. If you pass two buildings from the exhibition hall, there is a kitchen, which is the biggest building in the camp. At the back side of the kitchen, there is another hall that was used for human experiments, where a massive number of people were violently killed. On the opposite side, there is a shower room that was also used as a gas chamber. The Nazis used a gas called, “Zyklon B,” which was extremely painful and killed people within 20 minutes. Therefore, the tragedy of Auschwitz concentration camp and the people who died in this camp should be remembered and memorialized, so this tragedy should never happen again.
