The infamous Auschwitz concentration camp was epicenter of attempted annihilation of the Jews. Over the course of 5 years prisoners were brought to death by exhaustion of work, starvation, disease and deathly violence but most were put to death in this gas chamber. This was a place where prisoner life expectancy was usually 3 to 4 months, most of Jews just after arrival were sent to the gas chamber and murdered. 

Auschwitz is now a museum, the one with a deeply sinister feeling.  On displayed items confiscated by the Nazis suitcases that still show the names of the victims, the entire quarter surrounded by close to 100 thousand  shoes, even a mass of the mind-boggling display of the human hair. The rest of the things stolen from victims were cleaned, sorted out and distributed among German civilians or soldiers.  In 1941 when the Nazis decided the original Camp wasn’t big enough to accommodate their murderous ambitions they expend it creating Birkenau just 3km down the road. People were transported here in overcrowded rail cars.Today in the middle of the platform there is an example of such a train.  The lucky ones were warehoused in the rows upon rows of barracks, at its peak more than 90,000 prisoners were here at a time. Many more whose fate let them directly to homogeneous gas chambers to murdered and later their bodies burned in the crematorium.