- by Richard Titelius
- The Guardian
- Issue #2134
The ‘Selection’ point for prisoners arriving at Birkenau.
A piece in a recent issue of the Guardian (10 February 2025) examined the exploitation through slave labour by the Nazi occupiers of Poland during World War II at Auschwitz – Birkenau. Guests at the recent commemoration of the two camps’ anniversary included Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong. Wong was accompanied by the Prime Minister’s ‘anti-Semitism envoy,’ Jillian Segal who in a recent ABC Online report dated 5 February 2025, said that Australia was on the lips of many guests she had spoken with for the wrong reasons – antisemitic incidents in Melbourne and Sydney.
In Australia, Segal is known for being pro-war and for considering all opposition to Israeli attacks on Palestinians to be as antisemitic as recent attacks on synagogues.
If Segal were to take one of the official tours of the Auschwitz – Birkenau State Memorial, as I did in February, she would have heard detailed explanations of genocide perpetrated there very reminiscent of what Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people, and of what the colonisers in Australia did to Aboriginal people. That is, the Nazis tried to humiliate and belittle Jews, they killed women and children, actively tried to destroy their system of education, culture, religion, hospitals, museums, places of worship, used them as slave labour and killed their community leaders.
The tour starts with the barracks which housed the Jewish prisoners – though there were also non-Jewish prisoners such as Soviet POWs and captured Polish resistance fighters. The beds were just straw, later foam mattresses with four or more prisoners made to sleep on one bunk.
We were shown a room containing used 5kg tins of Zyklon B gas used for killing the Jews. Initially they used too little gas and the victims died an agonising death over 2 days. In the interests of efficiency, the dose was increased to ensure death within 15-20 minutes.
There were also disciplinary proceedings for prisoners who were seen as difficult, who were kept in solitary cells for some punishments and taken out and shot for others against the notorious “Death Wall” between blocks 10 and 11. Thousands perished in this way, and a sign in Polish, English, and Hebrew asks for silence in the courtyard where this occurred. A few of the solitary cells had their air holes at the top of their cells facing this courtyard so they would be able to hear everything that went on. These solitary cells were also small and cramped and the three days that prisoners were kept here often killed them.
We also pass the rooms with the many shoes and another with the implements used by handicapped people which were removed from them before cremation. The cruelty took bureaucratic forms: if someone didn’t answer their name, the roll call would start again from the beginning. When a prisoner escaped and hence didn’t answer the roll call, it kept going for 18 hours. 100 prisoners died. Doctors also conducted experiments on the prisoners including sterilisation trials on women who were dosed with X Rays which made their skin black and later killed them. There were still wreaths at the Death Wall from the previous weeks 80th Anniversary of liberation activities.
We were then taken to what was an electrified barbed wire fence around the gassing and cremation block and which had a sign with signs warning prisoners they would be shot if they approached.
We are then taken through the gas chamber itself and then the Crematorium No I, which in 1944 was converted to an air raid shelter as Allied forces had begun to bomb the factories nearby. Close by is the former residence of the Camp Commander Rudolf Höss who oversaw the establishment of the initial camp and then its massive upscaling. This was the house where the Oscar winning film, Zone of Interest was made about the idyllic bourgeois German life he tried to live on the other side of the wall of the concentration camp.
We were bussed to Auschwitz II or Birkenau 2 km away from Auschwitz I. There was a huge white tent still in place over the entrance to Birkenau used for the 80th Anniversary activities for international guests like Penny Wong and Jillian Seagal. We were shown a barracks made of bricks used by women and children. More than 200,000 children were killed here or died of diseases. We were then taken to the ‘Selection’ point. Here a doctor would assess prisoners to determine whether they would be suitable for slave labour or send them to the gas chambers and crematoriums.
There are photos at the museum in Auschwitz which show this process when it was taking place, shot by one of the guards. We were led to the impressive monument to the extermination taking place here – it is of two people standing with their mouths open gasping for air as they are experiencing the last minutes of their life in the barbaric gas chambers made to exterminate them as a race.
The scale and breadth of the barbarism to be seen here gave impetus to UNESCO designating Auschwitz-Birkinau as a World Heritage listed site, to preserve it so that people will remember and vow “never again.”
However, the barbarism inflicted on Palestine not just since 8 October 2023, when the Zionist Israeli government retaliated against the surprise attacks of Hamas, but arguably since 1948 when the state of Israel was created resulting in the displacement or killing of more than 750,000 of the Palestinian people, shows that through propaganda, spin and manipulation of events, a justification can be found for just about any horror thrown up by Western capitalist imperialism.
