So first let me say, Auschwitz: totally worth visiting.
Normally I'm not a huge fan of guided tours around museums because they don't give you enough time to read every single word on every single sign in every single room. But I have to say that the guided tour at Auschwitz was a good decision (I say "decision", but actually they won't let you visit alone between 10 am and 3 pm). The guide was incredibly well-informed and struck exactly the right tone. He didn't fall into the trap of spending four hours over-using adjectives to describe how terrible the camps were; he just showed us around and explained what we were seeing. Auschwitz kind of speaks for itself. So 5 stars for the guide, really.
Auschwitz in 2012 looks a lot like a college campus during Orientation Week, with rows of tidy brick buildings and lots of people wandering around looking confused and a little scared. Of course, during the Second World War the lawns were mud and filth and there were people dying or being killed all around. I didn't take any pictures of the rooms full of hair, shoes, brushes, suitcases, spectacles, or children's toys which were just a small fraction of the things stolen from the prisoners either before or after they were killed. You can find pictures on Google if you're interested, but I think they lose something in a photograph.
What struck me the most was the awful hypocrisy of the camps. There was a document on display (below) in which the SS ordered a truck to pick up "materials for the Jewish resettlement" from a nearby town. By "materials for the Jewish resettlement", they meant canisters of Zyklon B, which they would use in the gas chambers. And they knew this when they wrote the document. And the way they disguised the gas chambers as showers... they didn't just tell the people they were about to murder that they were showers, they went to the trouble of installing fake showerheads and a dressing room with hooks, where the prisoners were told to hang their clothes and remember where they left them so they could find them later. And again, the people who relayed these orders were 100% aware that they were about to kill these people. Like, if you're so proud of what you're doing, own up to it! If it's not a terrible, terrible thing to do, why do you have to hide it?
Later in the tour we took the bus to Birkenau, the camp the SS built when they realized they weren't killing people efficiently enough at Auschwitz. At Birkenau, the train could pull right into the camp to offload prisoners and half of the barracks were wood, rather than brick, which offered even less protection to the prisoners during cold Polish winters. A great achievement, I'm sure.
Birkenau was not as well-preserved as Auschwitz - after liberating both camps, the Russian Army dismantled a lot of the barracks at Birkenau; the war was still on and they needed the wood - and I therefore found it harder to picture what had happened there. Also, at this point we were four hours into the tour and I needed a sandwich.
Fact: the two warehouses at Auschwitz (where the Nazis kept the things they took from the prisoners before either killing them or putting them to work, which would kill them within days, weeks, or months) were named after Canada (Canada I and Canada II), because Canada was seen as a land of great wealth and promise and the warehouses were where they kept the "great wealth" they plundered from the people they then murdered. And that's a strong candidate for "worst compliment Canada has ever received".
So: quite depressing, very informative, completely worthwhile. That's my review.
P.S. There were signs up all over Auschwitz with a list of "do's and don'ts", most of which were pretty self-explanatory. The one that made me laugh was "No children under 12 without parents or guardians." Because, pro tip: If you sent your ten-year-old to Auschwitz alone, you're not going to be winning any "best parent" awards.
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