The itinerary was daunting. Check-in at 5 for the 7 a.m. flight to Cracow. After landing, we’d be driven straight to the site of the former synagogue at Oswiecim, burnt down, like countless others, during the Second World War. The significance of this particular synagogue? Oswiecim is known in German as Auschwitz, a name that has become a byword for the infamous concentration camps situated near the town. First, we’d be visiting ‘Auschwitz 1’, with its harrowing cabinet displays: vast piles of hair, spectacles, children’s shoes, false limbs, all routinely taken from prisoners before they were put to death. Then on to Auschwitz-Birkenau, bleak and enormous, where the average life expectancy of those ‘lucky’ enough to be selected for slave labour was only three months. Finally, we’d be bussed back to the airport for the return flight at 10:30 p.m. The organisers of the visit, the Holocaust Educational Trust warned us of temperatures of minus 15°C.; the day would be extreme, both physically and emotionally. I found myself unwilling to tell friends I was going so as to avoid the question I could barely answer myself: Why?
After all, there are less gruelling ways of visiting Auschwitz. The death-camps are well and truly on the tourist map. They’re even being sold as part of a stag-weekend package to Cracow. In that context, visiting with the HET project felt like approaching the place with proper seriousness. We were asked to think about the ethics of taking photographs at the sites. In the orientation seminar a few days before the visit, we met Susan Pollock, an Auschwitz survivor, brought as a girl by cattle-truck to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was separated from her mother and brother on arrival. It was night-time, she told us. Barking dogs. Incomprehensible commands. She never saw her mother again. Her brother was forced to become a Sonderkommando, and somehow survived, although his horrific experiences destroyed his mental health. A true understanding of the terror experienced by Susan and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children as they were wrenched from their families was surely beyond our imaginings. But, with night falling, and shivering in our thermals and woollens on the very spot where these cold-blooded ‘selections’ had taken place, we did gain a glimpse of something that few historical accounts could hope to convey.
Auschwitz was a place where those Jews who weren’t taken at once to the gas chambers were systematically treated like animals. The Jewish writer Primo Levi remarks that he was beaten ‘without anger’, as someone might whip a beast of burden. So our thanks should go the ‘educators’ from HET who managed to salvage at least some humanity from places whose sole purpose was to dehumanize the living and eradicate an entire people. We were read poems and diary entries from survivors, shown photographs that had been buried out of reach of the industrial destruction of the Nazis, told about individual acts of resistance, some large, some small, but all signs that the will to live had not entirely been snuffed out. And a day that could so easily have left us in despair ended on a note of hope with a simple candle-lighting ceremony. Having witnessed the palpable darkness of the place, this somehow felt appropriate, a flickering symbol of the failure of the Nazi project, but a reminder, too, that without constant vigilance, such horrors can all too easily creep back out of the shadows.
Christopher Holland
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