The Judenrampe

The ramp was built on the goods siding of Oświęcim station, halfway between the main camp and Birkenau. From the spring of 1942 to the middle of 1944 transports from all over occupied Europe stopped here: from France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Slovakia, Hungary, from the ghettos in Poland. People stepped out of the wagons straight onto the ballast, between two lines of track, and here, under the open sky, they went through selection.

The scale of this place is hard to take in. Most of the mass transports of Jews sent to Auschwitz in the period when the camp was working at its most intense passed through this ramp. Only in May 1944 did the Germans run the tracks into Birkenau itself, and the Judenrampe then lost its importance. The photographs the whole world knows were taken at that new ramp, inside the camp. The Judenrampe was left outside the frame and outside memory.

Today it is a strip of gravel between the trees, with two sections of track and one original freight wagon. It lies five hundred metres in a straight line from the Birkenau gate and a kilometre and a half from Auschwitz I. Every year more than a million people drive past it on their way to the Museum and almost nobody stops. Every one of our programmes begins here, because without the ramp the rest of the day has no point of reference.