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Processing Area For Auschwitz/Birkenau

 

This is where prisoners selected for slave labor were processed. Often people would have to wait outside naked in any weather. Here they would have to give up all their remaining possessions: money, jewels, even wedding rings and photos. Men and women were forced to stand on stools, in a room crowded with people while heads, armpits and other intimate parts of one's body were shaved by male prisoners and where numbers were tattooed in each arm. It is also where prisoners already in the camp were deloused because of the raging typhus epidemics.

 

Alan Jacobs