28 years on - My visit to Auschwitz - Birkenau in 1997

Words are really not enough to express the feel of this place, you have to experience the faces of the dead looking down on you from the photographs on the walls of the Auschwitz museum, carefully numbered and catalogued, and see the piles of belongings; shoes, spectacles and human hair. Our guide to the museum was a rather stern, sad-faced Pole of 66 years who explained that he was a retired chemical engineer who’s mother-in-law had died in the camp. He began by telling us the grim statistics of this place. 1,500,000 people killed here, not in an orgy of emotion, like a battle, but by an efficient, planned, killing factory, designed with the sole purpose of disposing of unwanted people, and using the remains in an effective way. Being an Engineer, a designer of machines, and hearing it coming from an Engineer, I found this thought particularly chilling. To visit Auschwitz 1, where so many came back from a day’s work and died, you must first walk through the gate with the cynical motto over it, “Arbeit mach Frie” (Work makes you free). The initial feeling is one of visiting a tourist attraction, the sight is so familiar. Then you remember the grim statistics, look down the double line barbed wire electrified fence and you begin to feel the horror creep under your skin. A party of Israeli schoolchildren. draped in Star of David flags were in front of us. I felt that this overt statement of Nationalism was out of place here. The museum is housed in the original brick barrack buildings, the tour takes you in to a number of these, each one focusing on a different aspect of life and death in the camp. The tour is cleverly designed to give you an increasing level of horror as it progresses. Blocks 12 and 14, -Dr Josef Mengele’s former experimental medical hospitals are closed to the public. The tour starts with maps of the places where people were taken from, and you see the convenient central location of Auschwitz. People from as far apart as Norway and the Greek Island of Rhodes were “resettled” in this place. It then moves on to show the living conditions in the camp, down corridors of numbered and named portraits of the camp inmates, each with their date of entry and date of death. Dates in most cases separated by 2-3 months. It was at this point that we got a shock that will remain with us for ever. Vicki found an unremarkable photograph of a woman called Helena Olejnik, probably in her 20s or 30s, but the close cropped hair and gaunt looks make it difficult to determine age. Unremarkable apart from the fact that Olejnik is my mother in law’s maiden name. It is not a common name, and Maria lost mother, father, brother and two sisters at the start of the war in unknown circumstances. She has never tried nor wished to find out their fate. We were both overcome with emotion. The rest of the tour passed through pathetic piles of the day to day items of people’s lives. Suitcases, spectacles, shaving brushes, and shoe polish. Each reminds you that these people really did not know their fate. Would you bother to bring shoe polish unless you really believed that you were being re housed? Nothing was wasted here, useful belongings were given to the good people of the Reich. The soldiers made sure that all belongings were taken and not misplaced on the trip. Everyone knows about the recycling of gold teeth and jewellery, it is almost a symbol of the Holocaust, but what about the recycling of hair to make cloth? The recycling of the ashes of the dead to make fertiliser, shoes to make artificial leather? This was a factory for recycling people. The wall against which thousands were shot is now a shrine. We prayed (it is a long time since I prayed), while, as if scripted by some director the heavens opened and it snowed violently. No one seemed to care. We moved on to the very place where Father Maximillian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic Priest, now beatified, made the ultimate sacrifice by asking to replace a family man who was sentenced to die by starvation. We also visited the cell where he finally starved to death. The tour ended inside the gas chamber, a converted underground munition store, our chemical engineer explaining the process in graphic detail. Birkenau or Auschwitz 2, is some two miles down the road from the museum, and is just vast. The openness of Birkenau contrasts starkly with the claustrophobia of the Auschwitz barracks An area the size of a medium sized airport, is horizon to horizon with the remains of brick chimneys of huts, looking like broken tombstones. The massive entrance gate, punched through by that terrible railiway line is an icon of the Holocaust, is a dreadful monument to the depths to which humanity can descend. All that remains of this killing factory are rows and rows of brick chimneys, the remnants of each sleeping barracks that housed prisoners, eleven to a bed. The buildings were originally pre fabricated wooden stables, but as there was little call for cavalry in WW2, the Reich put them to other good use. We were first taken to the top of the gate tower to view the huge place from a high vantage point, and one gets the impression of looking over an airfield from the control tower. We then went to look at the few remaining complete barracks from the inside. Three tier wooden “bunks” that would comfortably sleep four in each level, we were told housed eleven souls. Heating consisted of a burner at each end, joined by a long ground level brick “pipe” to distribute the heat. There were no windows, just gaps throughe which the wind could blow. It felt cold in there the day we were there, just 5 degrees outside. In the winter it drops to minus 30 in Poland. I, from my comfortable late 20th Century perspective cannot imagine the abject misery these people must have suffered in their short time here. Nor can I comprehend the minds that thought up such inhuman “Final Solutions”. I certainly cannot put it in to words, and no trip to a museum, however graphic, honest or realistic it is can ever hope to put it across to the visitor. Certain things I do believe though. • We must never forget what happened here, because every one of us has it in him/herself to do it again. • There should be no “statute of limitations” on crimes of genocide. • We must never believe anyone who denies that it happened. • We must always question the morality of what we are asked to do by our leaders, and have the strength of will to refuse if it goes counter to moral principles. In the words of Pastor Niemoeller, a Holocaust Victim “First they came for the communists and I did not speak out because I was not a communist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists and I did not speak out - because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I did not speak out - because I was not a Catholic. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me © John Worsnop 1997