Opportunities come and go and when they are there you should max the best use of them. I have been fortunate enough to enjoy able to visit Poland for reasons connected with work. What is more is that I have been able to fulfil a long term aim to pay my respects to the victims of the holocaust in my own way.
For six days I was lodged in the Polish city of Wroclaw. I arranged to fly in on the Friday late on and I had booked a hire car and hotel for the two days of the weekend. What is more when one of my Polish colleagues heard that I wanted to visit the concentration camps of Auswitz and Birkenau he very kindly offered to be my guide.
I have read only a few books on the subject of the holocaust and I have seen several films that retell those awful events. I was not sure how I would react and I was torn as to whether or not to take my camera. In my mind it is clearly wrong to refer to visitors to the camps as tourists, perhaps pilgrims, mourners, those seeking forgiveness, those who simply want to bear witness or who are determined never to forget and to ensure future generations never again allow such a thing to happen. In my case it is an individual act and, despite having my guide I wanted to be left in my own world with my own thoughts as I bore witness.
Birkenau
What I thought was the camp of Auswitz and one that I think most people imagine to be a typical camp is in fact Birkenau. The notorious arch thorough which passed the cattle trains and the single railway line, known the world over through the many documentaries and films, rises out of the flat surrounding countryside. It marked the central dividing line between two vast halves of the camp, themselves surrounded by barbed wire electric fences, watch towers and a ditch. The arch through which the trains passed is also the area where the victims were herded and then underwent selection, divided into those who would work until they died, be used for enforced medical experiments or simply marched to their immediate death by gassing. Children and in particular twins were sought after for grotesque experiments and ultimately murder. There was never any protest as the incoming victims were processed and later I reflected on this unknowing compliance.
At the opposite end of the entrance building with the archway are the remains of two crematoria, which the Nazis destroyed in a futile attempt to hide the evidence of their crimes. It is maybe 300 metres from the arches to what is left of the gas chambers and as I stood on the selection ramp where some 1.3 million victims, mostly Jews of course, had passed, I found it hard to absorb the scale and gravity of the crimes. I still reflect and cannot quite grasp the numbers and horror.
As you look towards the gas chambers down the ramp there are noticeably brick built huts on the left side and wooden ones on the right. With many former huts marked out by the still standing chimneys, usually two per hut, if they have survived intact. The original design of the huts was to accommodate 52 horses but in fact contained around 1,000 prisoners. That comparison of the regard that the perpetrators had for horses over and above their fellow man is staggering. It did not escape me and I wondered if anyone else had noted the numbers.
The camp is well organised, as distasteful as that may sound. You can identify the kitchen blocks and shower blocks by features. There are warehouses for the possessions, cruelly they have bars on the windows presumably to have prevented the prisoners from being able to steal back their own clothes.
The camp was peaceful and the weather was cold and foggy, there were not many visitors when we were there. Our visit passed by the memorial between the two piles of rubble marking the crematoria. Signs respectfully instructed visitors not to climb on the rubble, I cannot imagine anyone even thinking about that. Perhaps children who would not understand the significance of the act. I like to think that anyone who visits these places already has the deepest respect for the meaning of the place but I do suppose there will always be some who will not think or care.
The last thing I noted of significance for me was next to the specially commissioned memorial which has large brass tablets in multiple languages each marking the remembrance of the holocaust. I noted that there was a tablet in English and although I have no doubt that British victims are included in the loss it struck me that Britain as a whole had not been cleared of Jews and yet here we had a brass tablet to make sure we could understand. As I write I think of the Channel Islands as an exception. The experience thus far was an individual one and my guide and his girlfriend left me in my own thoughts, for which I was grateful.
We departed the camp in a rather more sombre mood than when we had driven down. Our next location was a few kilometres away to Auschwitz.
Auschwitz
The camp of Auschwitz is next to the local town and used to be a Polish barracks before being brought into use as a concentration camp by the Nazis. The first think you note is that it is much busier than Birkenau. There are queues of people waiting to enter the camp and there are lots of small food and book stalls in the immediate area outside the camp. There is no charge to enter either camp and there are tours that are available in multiple languages.
The camp is much more compact than Birkenau and the rows of barrack blocks look deceptively ordinary. It takes a moment to begin to appreciate again the horrors that took place here. A number of the blocks have been given over to particular displays. I cannot remember the order in which we visited and so I will just outline my thoughts and feelings as I recall them.
Some of the blocks are dedicated to the nations of those who lost their lives and we visited two in particular, that of Poland and Belgium. In the Polish block there was an overview of the war as it impacted upon the poles and one of the most striking things was the number of camps and ghettos that were situated in Poland. I have to be be honest in that I believed that there was only 1 ghetto, the Warsaw ghetto, but that is probably because it is the most well known. Effectively these ghettos formed a kind of open prison prior to the victims being transported to the camps. The final Solution evolved if I can use that term. The mechanism and challenges of the tasks the Nazis had set themselves required refinement. The intent was always there of course. Having read and learned a bit about the holocaust the images and stories of the atrocities have evolved in meaning to me from when I was a child to my adult understanding. I don't think I can ever take in the scale but when you put it into personal terms then things become quite different.
In the Belgian block the main display gave a rather cold and tragic statistical analysis of the victims who left the transportation centre in Mechelan. Each transport number was given with those dates that they left and arrived, how many were transported, how many died on the journey, how many were killed and how many survived. The latter rarely if ever broke into double digits and anywhere between 700+ victims were transported with each load. I have visited Kazzerne Dossin, it is an innocuous place. The fact that I had seen and stepped in the same place as these victims gave greater meaning to me. I thought of my family and friends, they were to come to mind later as the visit progressed.
As we stepped out of one of the blocks we saw a long queue of people filing into the basement of another and so we dutifully joined this queue and quietly snaked down the steps and along past holding cells to the very end of the corridor where we found some unusual brick features, which may have been some kind of punishment holes for prisoners. The three of us wondered why we had just queued as there was no display or information. My personal thoughts turned to the selection where those going to their deaths would have queued and filed off in a similar unquestioning manner, it made me shudder. By the time we realised we could do nothing but follow the snake back out, at least we came out.
We moved to another block but on our way we stopped to use the lavatory. I thought about the conditions the prisoners would have endured. In Birkenau the latrines were open and maybe some 100 or more holes, where my host told me there were given 30 seconds to do what they needed to do. I went to wash my hands and the water shocked me as it was hot. Usually in most public toilets hot water is rare. I thought of all places and in one of these barracks it really surprised me the contrast of having hot water as a luxury compared to what would have been available back then.
We came to a block that had displays of hair, shoes, cases and kitchen utensils. This was perhaps one of the the most moving for me. I stopped and gazed at the shoes thinking that at some point the men and women to whom they belonged would have been shopping and deciding over them much like we do when we buy our own. Each shoe representing a very personal choice, pleasurable experience and maybe a special gift from loved ones. Buying shoes will never quite be the same for me, I will without doubt reflect each time I look into the shop window or dither over which pair to buy. There was a display which has a vast mesh of round spectacle frames and lenses, my first thought here was that it could have easily passed for art in a gallery, but of course these belonged to real people and were not based on the imagination of an individual.
There was a room with hair, lots of pigtails and shaved hair. The signs indicated that the hair was used to manufacture fabric and that in a lot of cases the residue of zyklon b could be detected in the fabric. I thought of how I like to run my fingers through the hair of my wife as she lies resting her head on my chest. I thought of those victims and their mothers, wives, husbands, brothers playing with their hair, making pigtails, caressing it, smelling it. It was a difficult part of the display for me to absorb.
The girlfriend of my colleague was moved to tears when she saw the photographs and heard the translation of how female victims arrived with healthy weights and were severely underweight by the time the camp was liberated. I remember seeing 80, 65 and 56kg ladies reduced to half or a quarter of that. The images gave visual reference to this. As I looked at the images I had become kind of conditioned to expecting images of near skeletal figures when looking at concentration camp victims. The emphasis for me was the accompanying descriptions with the figures.
We needed to get out into the fresh air and temporarily have a break from sadness of the displays. We elected to leave but our last stop was perhaps the most chilling. A simple waist high black tablet politely reminded people entering that they must show respect for what had gone on in the building. We entered the crematorium, it was bare brick and in a dilapidated state, there was no real information on display as we entered a large room. I noted the black marks and some pipework and wondered where I was, looking up to the ceiling it suddenly came to me that this was the gas chamber and I was looking directly up to where the zyklon b tablets would have been dropped into the chamber. It chills me more now than it did when I stood there. We exited out past the ovens and back into the fresh air.
We had all seen more than enough and wanted to leave, we had a long drive back and plenty of time to reflect. I bought some more books on the subject from one of the several small bookshops next to the camp.
As I finish up on this I find myself not quite sure what to say. I feel deeply that people should be aware of what went on and the significance of it, with its attendant perversion of society and corruption of human behaviour. That said I also feel that it is an individual choice as to whether you would wish to visit such a place as this. I have spoken briefly to friends and family about the visit and I shy away, not because I think it should not be a topic of conversation, but because I don't think there is ever an appropriate moment to discuss the subject in conversation without making people feel sickened by it. Maybe I am wrong to feel inhibited, usually I am not. One of the reasons for me writing this is that it is my narrative and allows to express my thoughts.
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