Plaszow Concentration Camp  

Joseph Bau’s – Journey Through the Past

Former Plaszow inmate Joseph Bau (Prisoner Number 69084) invites the reader to a virtual tour of Plaszow Concentration Camp, as it was in 1944.  

Here is the Main Gate – thousands of people pass through it – in rows of three, keeping time to the monotonous pace of the rasping bellows of the Kapo, “Links, Links, Links” to the accompaniment of the hollow echoing of wooden shoes. The road -block loomed above the shaven heads of these innocents, whose only crime was imprinted on their identity cards – that they bore the title “Jude.”

In those days, in those glamorous days of the death camps, a very apt slogan was born – “You enter here, through the main gate – You exit through the chimney.”  On two sides of the main gate, on the left and on the right, running to a height of three metres, is the electrified fence, the length of which is four kilometres.

The fence surrounds the entire camp. It comprises two barbed wire lines of walls. Between the barbed-wire of the inner wall are strung high-tension wires, on porcelain insulators. Along the outer rim of the entire length of this wall of death, the area is surrounded by a complex arrangement of barbed-wire of five metres depth. 

Above this fortified wall are perched 13 watchtowers. Each watch tower was equipped with a machine gun, phone unit and with a revolving searchlight set upon its roof. Day and night these towers were manned by SS guards, and in between the two lines of wall, the dogs were unleashed, trained to attack people clad in striped prisoner garb.

This quilt of fortifications and obstacles, set up to prevent any possibility of escape from the killers net, was constructed by the imprisoned ones themselves, under the tutelage of the German “experts” and according to the inspired plans with their demonstrated efficiency in the erection of camps.

We have passed the gate. Today there is no SS guard, menacing gun at the ready to count us. Nobody searches our pockets for bread or sugar, nor does our Kapo inform us in his animal –like bellow “Zwei und Zwanzig Haeftlinge von der Bauleitung” (twenty-two prisoners from the building detail) and look here, we have already arrived in the area that once was in the sole possession of the “angel of death” and his trusted helpers, the Waffen –SS and Polizei Fuhrer.

To this place, even the sun would have not dared to seek access. Those in the know were convinced that she (the sun) would not have received a “Passier erlaubnis” (permission to enter) from the authorities in charge. Today the laws of the jungle no longer apply. We are walking, unbound, but in respectful silence as be-fits this sacred place. Beneath our shoes tiny pebbles rustle…. pay attention to these stones, please listen, they are weeping, and when you lift one such stone, you will feel the texture of marble.

If you should squeeze one between your fingers, you would see that it is no ordinary stone – there are Hebraic inscriptions engraved on its surface. Yes, all the roads in Plaszow camp are paved with tombstones of desecrated graves. A special detachment of the imprisoned ground the magnificent tombstones into pebbles and gravel and a second group of imprisoned pressed the pieces into the earth of the cemetery, with the aid of sledge-hammers and hand rollers.

Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/plaszow/bauplaszow.html


The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

www.HolocaustResearchProject.org


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