The “Judenrampe,” the railroad tracks between the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps where the Germans sent countless transports full of Jews, Poles, Roma and others who would become victims of the camp during the war, was opened to visitors on January 27, 2005.
The exhibition includes part of the tracks and the central part of the platform, which was associated with the unloading of the transports and with selection. Two original cattle cars that the Nazis used to transport people to Auschwitz—a French SNCF car from the turn of the 20th century and a German car from 1917—stand on the tracks.
Although the site is now original only to a small degree, its commemoration has great significance for both the memory of peoples and the history of the camp. The Nazis sent transports of over half a million Jews from all over Europe, as well as tens of thousands of Poles (mostly political prisoners), Roma, and others to the “Judenrampe” between the spring of 1942 and mid-May 1944.
In the field adjacent to the platform and along the road, SS physicians carried out selections of arriving Jews, as a result of which 70 to 75% of them were sent immediately to their deaths in the gas chambers.
