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The Birkenau camp (daily: June-Aug 8am-7pm; May & Sept 8am-6pm; April & Oct 8am-5pm; Jan, Feb & late Dec 8am-3pm; March & Nov-Dec 15 8am-4pm; free) is much less visited than Auschwitz, though it was here that the majority of captives lived and died. Covering some 170 hectares, the Birkenau camp, at its height, comprised over three hundred buildings, of which over sixty brick and wood constructions remain; the rest were either burnt down or demolished at the end of the war, though in most instances you can still see their traces on the ground - visible along with the rest of the camp from the top of the tower above the entrance gate, which you can climb.Walking through the site, stretching into the distance are row upon row of barracks, fenced off by barbed wire and interspersed with watchtowers. Mostly built without foundations onto the notoriously swampy local terrain, these are the pitiful dwellings in which tens of thousands (over 100,000 at the camp's peak in August 1944) lived in unimaginably appalling conditions. Not that most prisoners lived long. Killing was the main goal of Birkenau, most of it carried out in the huge gas chambers at the far end of the camp, damaged but not destroyed by the fleeing Nazis in 1945. At the height of the killing, this clinically conceived machinery of destruction gassed and cremated sixty thousand people a day. Most of the victims arrived in closed trains , mostly cattle trucks, to be driven directly from the rail ramp into the gas chambers. Rail line, ramp and sidings are all still there, just as the Nazis left them. In the dark, creaking huts the pitiful bare bunks would have had six or more shivering bodies crammed into each level. Wander round the barracks and you soon begin to imagine the absolute terror and degradation of the place. A monument to the dead, inscribed in ten languages, stares out over the camp from between the twisted ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria. Eerily, beyond the monument in the far northern corner of the camp area is a pond where piles of human ashes from the crematoria were deposited, its water still a murky grey.
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