Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Hardest and Most Important History Lesson of Our Lives

The bus parking at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Complex is filled with groups from all over the world—visitors from Asia, North and South America, and, also, Europe. Because every civilized person —and even those in denial who still need to be civilized— should visit at least once in their lives to remember the deportation and murder of over a million Jews in the largest Nazi concentration camp of World War II.


The site in the Polish city of Oświęcim is not a typical museum. It is a memorial, a stark reminder of the horrors that human beings are capable of. This was not a spontaneous act of cruelty. It was a calculated, meticulously planned effort to exterminate and erase from the face of the Earth Jews from Hungary, Poland, Romania, Italy, and beyond.

On Tuesday, April 8 (International Romani Day), the group of students and teachers visited the largest concentration and extermination camp of Nazi Germany, where 21,000 Roma (Gypsies) were murdered. 
It’s estimated that the SS and police deported at least 1.3 million people to the Auschwitz complex between 1940 and 1945. Of those deported, approximately 1.1 million were killed.


Estimated victim numbers at Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1940 to 1945 include:
  • Jews: 1,095,000 deported, 960,000 murdered.
  • Non-Jewish Poles: 140,000 to 150,000 deported, 74,000 murdered.
  • Roma (Gypsies): 23,000 deported, 21,000 murdered.
  • Soviet POWs: 15,000 deported and murdered.
  • Other nationalities: 25,000 deported, 10,000 to 15,000 murdered.  (1)
Auschwitz-Birkenau had the highest death toll among all the camps. The data shared by our guide was devastating. The mental images we formed as she spoke were harrowing.


As part of the Erasmus+ mobility in Poland for the project “The New Values of Democracy in Today's Europe”, we laid a floral tribute and stood in solemn silence before the scale of such tragedy. It was, without a doubt, the most chilling, essential, and powerful lesson in history.

Sadly, it’s hard to believe that after Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Mauthausen, and so many other horrific examples of the darkest human cruelty, humanity still hasn't learned. After the Nazi Holocaust, the world has witnessed mass atrocities in the Soviet GULAGs, Maoist China's camps, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the ethnic cleansing in Srebrenica (Bosnia-Herzegovina), and today, in Gaza… Humanity still hasn’t learned.



Fonts: 
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Auschwitz” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/auschwitz. Accessed on 08/04/2025.

Location: Oświęcim, Polonia

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