Guard tower in Auschwitz I. The barracks in the background are two story brick structures built with prisoner labor.
One of the brick barracks in the women's camp at Birkenau. This photo can also be seen at the Cybrary of the Holocaust website , along with the following caption: Barrack consisting of "sixty-two bays each with three 'roosts'. A roost was originally supposed to hold three prisoners, but Bischoff's [chief of the Auschwitz building office] numerology increased the capacity to four. To sleep, to sit, and keep his belongings, each prisoner was now provided with 'private' space that amounted to the surface dimensions of a large coffin or the volume of a shallow grave."* Originally built for Soviet POW'S, it was later to become part of the woman's camp. "Charlotte Delbo in her book "Auschwitz and After", wrote: "A brick has come loose from the low wall separating our cell from the next where other larvae sleep, moan and dream under the blankets that cover them- these are shrouds covering them for they are dead, today or tomorrow what does it matter... We feel that we teeter on the edge of a dark pit, a bottomless void-it is the hole of the night where we struggle furiously, struggle against another nightmare, that of our real death."** *Deborah Dwork & Robert Jan van Pelt. Auschwitz 1270 To The Present (New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 265-6. ** (Yale University Press 1995, p.56)
