Two carriages on a restored old railway track are a reminder of an unimaginable tragedy. This is the Judenrampe, the "Jewish ramp" halfway between Auschwitz and Birkenau. Here, one move of the SS man's finger meant life or death. Most often death. Hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over Europe were deported here. Most were murdered in the gas chambers, as historians from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum tell us.
We are on the site of the so-called old Jewish ramp, or Judenrampe, at the place where the boy in the navy uniform got off the train. The artist who drew this scene probably understood the importance of a document created at the risk of his life, so he therefore hid it in a bottle in the foundation of one of the barracks. Two old freight wagons stand on the restored tracks between the grounds of the Auschwitz railway station and the contemporary houses of the village of Brzezinka, whose residents were displaced in 1941, and whose demolished houses provided the materials used to build the Birkenau camp.
“This place certainly looks a bit different now, if only because it has undergone some restoration work,” says Piotr Setkiewicz, head of the Research Centre at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. “The wagons that are on the tracks today are also inauthentic in the sense that it is not at all certain that they would have been used to transport deportees to Auschwitz. On the other hand, these are wagons from the era,” he adds.
The old Jewish ramp is located about halfway between the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps. It was here that from 1942 the Germans began to bring in large transports of Jews condemned to extermination. It was also here that selections took place, during which a nod of the SS doctor meant life or death. According to surviving documents, 75-80% of the Jews deported here from all over Europe were loaded onto trucks and taken straight to the gas chambers, where they were murdered.
“During selection, SS doctors were guided primarily by suitability for work in the camp,” underlines Jacek Lachendro, a historian from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, stressing the dual function of the death camp and the labour camp. “In the first instance, people who looked young or were fit for work had a chance of survival and were sent to the camp. Children, women with small children and the elderly were automatically sent to death. At the same time, there were periods during the operation of the camp when there was less need for manpower and therefore those who were potentially fit for work were also sent to the gas chambers.”
The first makeshift gas chambers were called red and white houses after the colour of the walls of the buildings from which the Germans had evicted the inhabitants and which they had adapted for their killing machine. Today, these buildings no longer exist; simple, multilingual plaques remind us of the places of execution. In total, around 1.1 million Jews were deported to Auschwitz, of whom barely 200,000 were deemed fit for work and registered in the camp. The remainder were murdered in the gas chambers.
The podcast was produced as part of the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański Eastern Europe College project funded by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Public task financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland within the grant competition “Public Diplomacy 2022”. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the official positions of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland.