Original posted on London to New York blog, March 26, 2010
Oswiecim, Poland
THE first question that met me after wandering out of Auschwitz was simple. “How was that?”
At least it was a simple question compared with those which had been raging in my mind for the previous couple of hours, wandering around the site of the former concentration camp.
Answering was not simple. It involved opening and closing my mouth a few times, shaking my head and uttering a non-committal, “Dunno, really.” Not insightful, but it has taken a while to form coherent thoughts on what we had just senn.
Having had a few hours to digest it all, three things stick in my mind.
The first was the chill which ran through my body in the short trip through the rebuilt crematorium, almost at the end of the museum.
A simple sign as you walk out of the somehow inappropriate sunshine into the cold, semi-darkness reminds you this was a place where many thousands of people walked to their deaths and asks for silence as you walk through.
That adds to the sense of the ghosts filling the air and the feeling of almost crushing confusion and desperation at what went on there.
There’s little to see – a simple memorial on one side, the fires used to carry out the final acts of such a cruel story on the other – and it takes just a few seconds to walk through.
You want to run out as quickly as you can, but that is fighting against the power seeping out of your legs as the sheer weight of what you have witnessed presses down on you.
It was certainly a relief to come out blinking into the sunlight and leave the darkness behind. Shedding what lies within the darkness from my mind will take a fair while longer.
The second point which hammered home came in the third of the camp huts which house a variety of exhibitions about what the camp was used for, how it was run and the people subjected to such horrors.
The first two catalogued why such a camp was set up, how the people were shipped in to work as slave labour until starvation, beatings or the sheer surfeit of cruelty ended their days.
Horrible as they are, they didn’t really get to me. This was little not seen before in films, documentaries or books. And the sheer numbers of people who were fodder for the Nazi machine in these camps is hard to take in.
But then you enter the third hut and the central hallway is lined down its entire length, several rows deep, by pictures of those who died here.
Face after face after face, many with a date of birth, each with their camp number and each with the day they entered the camp.
And the day they died.
Many lasted just a few weeks, a few reached four or five months. It takes a lot of searching to find anyone who lasted any longer.
The faces all show utter bewilderment. They did not know what went on in these places. None could have guessed the horrors that really lay ahead when herded onto trains.
After the incomprehensible scale of the numbers involved and the pile after pile of discarded suitcases, shoes and even hair from the previous rooms, these faces brought the whole thing back to a human level.
Each face, scared and confused as you try to wonder just what they went through, hits home. Hard.
Those endless pictures – broken every so often by a flower or ribbon left by later generations – make for uncomfortable viewing, but this was never going to be easy, was it?
In comparison, the third lasting emotion was anger – not at the people who carried out these atrocities. You do not need to visit Auschwitz to have that feeling.
No, this was anger at myself.
Every German and Polish school pupil has to visit a concentration camp every year, so the place is crawling with teenage tour parties.
Large numbers of them look extremely bored, block the way for anyone else and a few even laugh and joke at the most inappropriate time.
And, as happens walking around anywhere with lots of people, their attitude began to make me fume.
But how can you get angry at such behaviour here of all places? How did their behaviour really matter compared with what happened in the prison block, the gas chambers or at the execution wall?
How can you be intolerant of other people surrounded by this? Wasn’t that what caused all this – intolerance and a refusal to understand other people?
It was certainly a sobering morning. Not pleasant, not comfortable and not something to repeat in the near future.
But I’m certainly glad I went. From the moment the itinerary first arrived with Auschwitz on the list, it was down as a must-do trip.
Among all the beautiful sights which have come our way in the previous five days – and those to come as we plough on to New York – the images of Auschwitz, and sister camp Birkenau (with the endless rows of chimneys which are all that remain from the huts which housed the prisoners), will stay with me.
Not through photos – it just didn’t seem right to take more than the couple which appear with this entry – but by them being burned onto my mind.
And of that, I’m glad.
