Photos from Gross-Rosen

	The last camp I visited was the labor camp of Gross-Rosen, outside of the town of Rogoznica. Gross-Rosen is not considered a death camp because its primary function, according to the Nazis was labor (Arbeit), not annihilation (Vernicht), but over 40,000 prisoners were murdered here--not by gassing, but through 12-hour working days in a gravel mine. I quickly discovered that there is no such thing as a concentration camp. Every concentration camp was a death camp. The only difference was in the method of the killing: slowly through work, or quickly through gas.
	Pictures on display in the museum.
	Pictures on display in the museum.
	A map of the camp.
	Gross-Rosen had over 100 satellite camps. This map shows them all. When it opened in 1941, Gross-Rosen had 722 Russian prisoners of war. Within two years, over 125,000 people would work in the camp.
	The small sculpture inside the G-R museum.
	This is an interior shot of one of the Nazi bomb shelters. There was no light, so this is as far as we could go without getting lost.
	The door to the bomb shelter.
	This is the exterior of the same bomb shelter.
	The entry way of the bomb shelter, where the light quickly faded.
	A shot of the ceiling.
	This is a shot out one of the view slits of the Nazi bomb shelter.
	This is the main gate into the Gross-Rosen camp.
	A close-up of the gate itself.
	This was a small sculpture beside the main gate.
	A close-up of the hand sculpture there.
	This was also beside the main gate. It is the remnants of the rail line with one of the cars used for hauling granite from the mines.
	This shows the poor disrepair of the former barbed wire fence around Gross-Rosen.
	The remaining fencing around the exterior of the camp.
	This helps to show the tiered landscape of Gross-Rosen. The ground is completely granite underneath the soil, so the Nazis had to carve terraces into the rock in order to create level places upon which to build the barracks.
	This is an interior shot of the kitchen, the only building left standing at Gross-Rosen. These clamps once held a water pipe.
	One of the long troughs used for food preparation.
	As with most of the block at Gross-Rosen, only a small sign and the outline of a foundation marks where each barrack was located.
	The entire landscape is traced with these former foundations.
	This is a shot of the current granite mine, located some kilometers away from the camp site. The massive cranes can be heard from Gross-Rosen.
	Like Chelmno, Gross-Rosen has many separate monuments, all donated and maintained by separate interest groups. This plaque display surrounds the only tree on the camp grounds.
	This is a reconstruction of the crematorium on the spot where it one rested.
	This is a good example of the amount of the foundations that remain at Gross-Rosen. After the war, locals took much of the stone that made-up these buildings and reused them in their own homes.
	Close-up of the reconstructed crematorium.
	This is another monument to those who lived and died at Gross-Rosen.
	Like at Belzec, this wall contains the names of the many communities who lost citizens in Gross-Rosen. Unlike the Operation Reinhard camps, whose only goal was the extermination of Jews, there were many other groups of people in labor camps like Gross-Rosen. Many Polish Catholics were worked to death in the mines at Gross-Rosen.
	This is the main monument in the center of the wall.
	On another end of the camp was this monument, placed here to remember certain Catholics who perished here.
	A close-up of the Catholic monument.
	One barrack still exists, partially intact, since it was built into the ground.
	This a view of the bunks, which remain.
	Many of the larger buildings exist as empty basements, taken over by nature.
	The steps into one of these basements.
	Another building, which remains partially intact thanks to its placement into the surrounding granite.
	This is one of the original iron bins that held the freshly mined granite.
	In the museum, they have many artifacts that have been recovered from Gross-Rosen, including this stack of soup bowls. The same bowls were used by the prisoners in Auschwitz/Birkenau.

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