Birkenau
You have to leave the borders of Auschwitz I to go to Birkenau. If you have arrived by tour, your guide will already take you there. If you have a car you can follow the signs or just use a taxi. İt is about 3 km. You need to leave your car in the parking area outside the camp and get in. The first thing you see in the first image that what we see is deceptive. (The image below) The reason we say that is that this entry is reflected in the movies as the famous Auschwitz entrance. But this is the Birkenau entrance.
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"Selection" of Hungarian Jews on the ramp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland, around May 1944. Jews were sent either to work or to the gas chamber. The photograph is part of the collection known as the Auschwitz Album. See Auschwitz Album, Yad Vashem: "The Auschwitz Album is the only surviving visual evidence of the process leading to mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau." The album was donated to Yad Vashem by Lili Jacob (later Lili Jacob-Zelmanovic Meier), a survivor, who found it in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in 1945.
The collection as a whole was first published as The Auschwitz Album in 1980 in the United States, Canada and elsewhere, by the Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, but individual images had been published before that – for example, during the 1947 Auschwitz trial in Poland and the 1963–1965 Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. It is not known when this particular image was first published.
Female prisoners at Birkenau
An image from the Auschwitz Album. Female prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. "Roll call in front of the kitchen building."
The later-established Birkenau camp is known as the place where the genocide and mass murder took place. In addition to the systematic slaughter, difficult and primitive living conditions and hunger caused thousands of deaths. The crematoriums and many ward buildings used in Birkenau have been destroyed by allied bombing. However, during restoration, some buildings have been rearranged in accordance with the original. When you enter into those ward buildings you can feel the fear, shame and hopelessness they lived more closely.
