History of Sorts

In Auschwitz fields where shadows lay,
Beneath a sky once soft and gray,
The burning pits, an open grave,
Consuming all the souls they gave.

The earth, a pyre of endless pain,
Where ash fell down like bitter rain.
The flames roared in hell’s desire,
And teardrops trembled on the fire.

The faces lost, the names erased,
Humanity’s heart is cruelly displaced.
The air was thick with smoke and cries,
As hope dissolved beneath the skies.

Yet in the embers, something stirred,
A silent scream, a whispered word—
A plea for peace, for one last breath,
Before the kiss of burning death.

Teardrops on the fire hissed,
In memory of all we missed.
And though the flames devoured all,
Their spirits rose, though bodies fell.

For even in the darkest night,
Their tears still spark a fragile light,
A witness to what can’t expire—
The teardrops burning on the fire.

When the mass extermination of Jews began at Auschwitz in 1942, the corpses of the murdered people were initially buried in mass graves on the edges of the Birkenau camp. During his second visit to Auschwitz in July 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered that they be exhumed and burned.

At first, wood from demolished houses near the camp, which had belonged to expelled Polish farmers, was used for fuel. Later, branches and scrap wood were brought by the truckload from the nearby forests.

About 107,000 corpses were burned in this way by the end of the year. In the spring of 1943, when the crematoria went into operation, the burning of bodies in pits was limited. The burning of corpses on a large scale resumed in the spring and summer of 1944 during the so-called Sonderaktion “Ungarn” and the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt ghetto.

Sources

http://70.auschwitz.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=237&Itemid=179&lang=en

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/crematoria-and-gas-chambers-at-auschwitz-birkenau

https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/auschwitz-and-shoah/the-extermination-procedure-in-the-gas-chambers/