Seventy years ago today, the Allies liberated the Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration camp, and so today has been designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations General Assembly.

I visited those camps when I was in Cracow in September of 2013, and I am shocked to discover that I didn’t post about my visit. I suppose it’s because every time I look at my photos I get a sick feeling in my stomach. I’ll try to do a post later, but let me put up just a few photos that must stand for the eleven million exterminated in this worst of all genocides. Remember that the oft-cited figure of six million Jews represents only a bit more than half of the people murdered en masse by the Nazis: there were eleven million total, including non-Jewish Poles, gays, criminals, Communists, clerics, the mentally ill, gypsies, and so on.

If you’re ever in Cracow, Poland, by all means go to Auschwitz/Birkenau, about sixty miles away. You will see the camps, the remains of the gas chambers, the platform on which prisoners arrived (and were immediately selected for death or for a short, miserable life), the barracks (in original condition at Birkenau), and an immensely disturbing museum. You won’t be the same person after your visit. And no matter how much you’re mentally prepared, it will still hit you in a way you didn’t imagine.

I won’t say anything profound to mark the millions of voiceless victims killed by the Nazis. Others, including the survivors, have done that. Let these pictures speak for themselves:

Here are some items in the museum in Auschwitz. Below are some suitcases taken from those arriving by train, most of them immediately sent to the gas chambers and killed within half an hour after arrival. People were told that their suitcases (carefully marked with their names and often addresses) would be returned after their “shower”. They weren’t, of course: they were plundered. The suitcases on display fill an entire room (there’s also a whole room of hair shaved from women’s heads before they were killed, which was used to fill mattresses, but that’s the one thing you’re not allowed to photograph).

A collection of prosthetic limbs, crutches, braces, and other medical aids taken from those who were gassed. Any infirmity, of course, marked you immediately for the gas chamber.

The shoes of the dead:

The saddest collection: dolls and children’s clothes taken from youngsters who were killed. Nearly everyone under the age of 14 was immediately gassed upon arrival at the Birkenau platform:

Below are some photographs of those who died. When the Nazis began sending people to the camps, they photographed every prisoner who wasn’t immediately killed, making a record of the inmates. The people below were photographed immediately after having their hair shorn and donning prison garb. Their faces tell all. The captions tell you who they were and how long they lived after arrival—usually only a few months at most. (Most either died of disease or malnutrition, or were gassed.) It was only later that the Nazis decided that the photographic system was too cumbersome and began tattooing numbers on the prisoners’ arms. I show only a few of the many photographs on display. Those who were sent to the gas chambers on arrival were not photographed.

Wolf Flaster; arrived at Auschwitz December 12, 1941, died there December 16, 1941:

Herbert Guttman; arrived at Auschwitz November 28, 1941, died there December 18, 1941.

Ryszard Borghard; arrived at Auschwitz April 6, 1941, died there October 10, 1941:

Petroela Welna; arrived at Auschwitz June 17, 1942, died there September 25, 1942. Her hair has been cropped. 

Pinkas Klapper; arrived at Auschwitz February 26, 1942, died there March 17, 1942.

Those eyes will haunt me forever.

Wikipedia has an informative collection of Holocaust-related photographs; just go here and scroll forward through the pictures using the right arrow.

And, showing its sensitivity to the occasion, the BBC’s “Big Questions” site put out this tw**t  yesterday:

What they’re asking here is this: “Isn’t it time for people to quit whining about the Holocaust”? And by “people,” I suspect they mean “Jews,” for a common trope among Arabs—and many Westerners—is that the Jews continually paint themselves as victims by bringing up the Holocaust. Listen to Sir Ben Kinglsey’s message below, particularly the bit beginning at 5:03.

And no, BBC, it will never be time to lay the Holocaust to rest, or either of the World Wars. There is too much about human nature carried along with those memories.