Our Project

Gaining inspiration from our trip and experiences, we decided to set up a campaign against the prejudice that still exists in the world today. It particularly bothered me that, despite the extent of the suffering and discrimination that took place during the Holocaust, which most people today are aware of, the thing which started the whole process in the first place- everyday prejudices escalating- is still going on, and genocides are still taking place across the world.

A quote which we were made to think about and discuss in the introduction and follow up seminar was:

'The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.' - Hegel, a 19th Century German philosopher.

Thinking about this now, this is a very interesting viewpoint, as we are taught about the Holocaust in the school as part of the curriculum, but I still hear people being called either 'Jew', 'gay' and 'gypsy' as an insult around school, and people still make jokes about the concentration camps. 

Perhaps it's because most people don't connect with the topic in the way that we did, because after all they haven't had our experience of visiting Auschwitz, and I'm sure that most of them don't feel that they personally have any problems with the minority that they are using as a term of abuse, but the principle is there, and that principle is one of prejudice rather than equality.

Our project is based on the idea that everyone can do something to help combat everyday prejudice like that, and the M.A.D. in 'Get M.A.D.' or 'Are You M.A.D.' stands for 'Making a Difference'.

We would really appreciate any help we can get in promoting this project and any contributions :)

In one day, inmates would often no more than half a litre of so called ‘coffee’, coupled with soup often cooked with rotten vegetables, and later 300 grams of bread, 30 grams of marge and a drink brewed of herbs. The caloric value for the entire day was 1300-1700 or often less.

We also visited the supposed ‘prisoner’s toilets’, if that is what you can call them. They were situated inside another wooden barrack and consisted of three long stone troughs running down the left, right and centre of the barrack with a few hundred circles carved out of the top of them. For a long time the camp had no sewerage or water systems. There was a special regulation in the camp that limited each inmate to ten seconds when using the toilets. Sarah and I were told stories of up to three people sharing one hole at once, and fairly often, people would get pushed of the toilet when using it.

Sarah and I did not visit Block 25, however, Kitty Hart Moxen informed us of the atrocities that took place there. This barrack was isolated and used for women who were ill as they awaited their turn to go to the gas chambers. However, whilst in the barrack, the SS guards didn’t feed the women and they were often in there for several days under extremely poor sanitary conditions, many died there. 

At the end of the railway are the remains of 2 crematoria and gas chambers. In the ruins it is still possible to discern the underground changing room, where the victims were made to undress before being killed. Our guide spoke of children’s toys that were still being found at the sight to this day. This was extremely moving and upsetting as it made Sarah and I consider all the friends and family that people would have lost.

Between the ruins of the crematoriums stands a monument built to help us remember the victims of Auschwitz. Sarah and I, along with the rest of the group, stood by the monument and reflected upon the Holocaust following a ceremonial ritual carried out by a Rabbi. Finally, we walked back along the railway leaving candles on the side. In total, 1.5 million people died at Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp. It was hard to grasp the reality of this number at first, however, seeing the evidence and remains of such a terrible event in history helped slightly. I still don’t feel I can ever fully grasp and come to terms with the number of lives lost at the camp; however, when the Rabbi informed us that if one were to give just one minute to each individual that died at the camp, they would be stood there for over three years, I nearly began to grasp the scale.

I’d say that if there was one positive thing that I have gained from this experience, it is that I now feel a greater need to make a difference about the prejudices and discrimination that still exist within the world. I can’t imagine anything worse than more people suffering, and more lives being wasted on the racism and discrimination that continues to pervade the world.

- Aggie

Auschwitz Birkenau

Auschwitz one was originally meant to hold polish prisoners, however, as time passed the Gestapo begun to deport soviet prisoners of war, political prisoners, members of the resistance and eventually gypsies and Jews to the camp. Due to an increased number in inmates, the Nazis needed more territory to place them all. As a result, an enormous death camp was built three kilometres away from Auschwitz one called Auschwitz Birkenau. The inmates were condemned to death and used as cheap labour by the SS. This camp became the symbol of terror and genocide and contained four crematoria, gas chambers, pyres and pits.

On arrival to Auschwitz Birkenau, Sarah and I went into the watch tower which effectively gave a clear view of the entire camp. It is situated directly above the railway and the entrance to the death camp. Prior to the visit I had been informed that it was the largest of all the camps of mass extermination; it was approximately 425 acres and had contained over 300 buildings within it. This fact encapsulates the size of it; in august 1944 the total number of prisoners reached approximately 100,000. This was possibly one of the most disturbing sights to see considering how many people suffered there. Furthermore, the camp was situated near forests which are normally associated with a thriving wildlife.  However, the tranquillity of the place was startling. I saw no bird, no animal, and the grass was scarce. Yet, somehow, out of the quietness I felt a loud sense of unease and grief. One thing the group commented on was the stark contrast between the concept of the camp, and the beautiful weather. Despite the sunshine, the place still reeked of death and sorrow.

Under the watch tower was the railway. It ran all the way to the other side of the camp and would have carried deportees from all over the world. Either side of the railway were two unloading ramps whereby the infamous ‘selection’ process would take place. This was the place where families and friends, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons would be separated and sent their destiny. Victims would often be quite brutally forces out of the tiny train wagons after days of travelling whereby SS guards with guns would separate men and women into two lines. The trucks were of an unimaginably small size and up to 100 people could be forced into one. Many people died en route to Auschwitz due to suffocation or starvation within these compartments. When the holocaust survivor ‘Kitty Hart Moxen’ gave us her account of her experience she told us that to be sent towards the gas chambers meant you would be sent to your death, and if one was sent the other way, they would remain alive merely to endure exhausting labour every day. On average, almost 80% of those arriving from each transportation were immediately sent to the gas chambers.            

Subsequently, Sarah and I visited the prisoner’s barracks. Very few were brick and the rest were wooden. Many of the wooden buildings had once served as field stables for 52 horses and were soon housing up to 1,000 prisoners. It was hard to imagine that so many people could fit into one of these barracks, never mind sleep in one. Most of the victims would sleep in three tier berths whereby on one level, an average of 8 people would lie. Furthermore, it was not uncommon that rats and other animals and insects bringing epidemics. The inmates were subjected to a lack of water; terrible sanitary conditions, inadequate clothing and barely any food. Chimney flues were built inside and the smoke passing through was supposed to heat the room; however, we were informed that these were infrequently used.

- Aggie

Auschwitz One Continued...

After the building with the possessions of the prisoners in, we saw block 10, the building where doctors used victims to do cruel experiments on, most infamously by Josef Mengele.

Following this, we went inside block 11. This was the torture block, often called a ‘prison within a prison’. In here we saw the horrendous conditions victims were put into as punishment for committing crimes such as being late for roll call. There were different cells for different methods of torture, for example we saw standing cells, where several prisoners were put in a small enclosed space with only room to stand up for multiple days and nights. We also saw the former starvation and suffocation cells, and in the yard outside was the ‘death wall’, against which executions by shooting took place. Most of the victims of block 11 were already weak with hunger and exhaustion through the work they were being forced to do and the conditions they were living under, so many died from the torture carried out in the cells.

Further around the camp, we saw Auschwitz One’s former gas chamber. Walking inside the cold grey building, it was impossible not to imagine all the people who had walked there before us seventy years ago. Our group entered in silence and judging by the tension and emotion in the air I think everyone else was going through what I was, because it was very difficult to know what to feel. I knew the history behind Auschwitz and the facts and statistics, but actually picturing crowds of people being made to walk into the room, locked in and gassed to death, then taken into the next room, being stripped and cremated, was very difficult. One of the lessons from Auschwitz which we concentrated on while we were there was trying to see the victims as individuals and not just focus on the statistics. This is actually harder than it seems at first. It’s easy to imagine 20 or even 100 people, as these are numbers we can picture and relate to our life, but 6,000,000 people is more than most of us will ever have experienced, and trying to imagine that many different life stories, all totally unique, is intangible.

Finally, during our visit to Auschwitz One we saw the house of Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz. Höss was in charge of overseeing what happened in Auschwitz One, and lived with his family of four children in a house only yards away from the crematorium. This really showed me that the Nazis and people in charge of the running of the genocide honestly believed that they were doing the right thing, to the extent that Höss was able to bring up his children just next door to the site where innocent people were being murdered and abused every day. Höss was caught after the war and we saw the gallows, situated next to the gas chamber in the site of Auschwitz One, where he was hanged on the 16^th April 1947.

Gallows where Rudolf Höss was hanged 

-Sarah

Pigtail

While we were in the room with the hair in, the LFA team gave us this poem to read:

Pigtail

 

When all the women in the transport
Had their head shaved
Four workmen with brooms made of birch twigs
Swept up
And gathered the hair

 

Behind clean glass
The stiff hair lies
Of those suffocated in gas chambers
There are pins and slide combs
In this hair

 

The hair is not shot through with light
Is not parted by the breeze
Is not touched by any hand
Or rain or lips

 

In huge chests
Clouds of dry hair
Of those suffocated
And a faded plait
a pigtail with a ribbon
Pulled at school
By naughty boys

-Tadeusz Różewicz, The museum, Auschwitz, 1948

Auschwitz One

After the graveyard, we were taken to Auschwitz One. This is the work camp, with the famous sign ‘Arbeit Mach Frei’- ‘Work means Freedom’ in German- at the gate. Something that I found surprising about this site was that it was in the middle of a village, surrounded by houses, shops and people carrying out their everyday life. I’m not sure why, but I’d pictured the camp as being out in the middle of nowhere, perhaps because I couldn’t imagine people allowing the atrocity to happen somewhere where they couldn’t deny it’s existence.

 

Auschwitz one was surrounded by a double layer of very high barbed wire fencing and with intermittent signs with a skull and cross bones and the words ‘Halt!’ and ‘Stoj!’  written on them. This really gave the camp a hostile, threatening feel. Auschwitz one was originally set up as a work camp, but the conditions the prisoners were kept in were so horrendous that most were killed by the work. They were starved, only given a thin pair of clothes to wear- even in the thick snow in winter, and over exerted. The layout of the camp was tall red brick buildings in rows, and we went inside a few of them.

 

The first building we went in contained possessions and photographs of the prisoners. I found this particularly difficult and emotional, as it really personified the victims and also brought the scale of the genocide into something more tangible. There was a whole room full of suitcases, all of which had people’s names and addresses on them. This was poignant as it reminded us that, on entering the camp, people had with them any possessions that they thought they’d need to be relocated and the names allowed us to imagine the individuals, all of whom had different hopes, dreams and expectations of what would happen to them. They had these possessions taken from them on arrival.

 

Another room was full of shoes, some of which were very tiny and belonged to children, and there was a cabinet displaying items which belonged to babies. But the section which most affected me was the room full of hair.

 

The room contained 7 tonnes of human hair, which had been shaved from the heads of victims. It was normally exported and used for stuffing pillows and duvets, so the hair in the room was only a small sample of the total amount, as it was only that which was found there at the time of the liberation. Some of the hair was still styled into plaits or contained bobbles or grips, and seeing the sheer amount that was there was horrible because it really put into context the enormous number of people who were at the camp, and the reminder of the fact that the prisoners had their heads shaved showed the dehumanisation they went through on entry to the camp.

-Sarah

The Jewish Cemetery

En route to Auschwitz one Sarah and I visited a small Jewish Cemetery in the town of Oswiecim (renamed Auschwitz after the Nazi invasion in 1939). We had in fact passed many graveyards whilst driving through Poland; however, what alarmed us was the size and maintenance of the other graveyards in comparison to the Jewish one we encountered. The Jewish Cemetery was surrounded by unnervingly large brick walls and the only entrance was secured by a metal gate. The reasons for such high security were due to recent events involving vandals breaking into the Cemetery and smashing the gravestones within it. Such events merely go to show that some people continue to fail to acknowledge the severity of discrimination and what it can escalate into despite the happenings in that very town in the 1940’s. After the gate had been unlocked and we were let in I was stuck by how dishevelled and unkempt the display before me was. There were very few graves and the few standing were marked with numbers or Swastikas and there was a distinct lack of flowers. Following the Nazi invasion of the Polish town in 1939 the Cemetery was vandalized and destroyed; many gravestones were smashed and used to pave the town of Oswiecim. After the war, a Jewish man named Szymon Kluger revisited Oswiecim and re-erected the gravestones that stand at present. In the centre of the Cemetery he also crafted a monument from a collection of the smashed gravestones. Another object that caught my attention was a small wooden construction by the entrance of the Cemetery that looked almost like a small house. It was in fact the grave of Szymon Kluger who was the last Jewish person to live in Oswiecim to this day. Sadly he died in 2000.

Issues that we reflected upon whilst in the Cemetery were matters such as; why are there no Jewish people living in Oswiecim at present? Why would vandals destroy the gravestones within the cemetery considering the events that took place within the town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz)? Have we learnt anything from history? Please feel free to comment with your views upon any of the above issues.

Pictures of the memorial made from gravestones (left) and Szymon Kluger's grave (right)

-  Aggie  :)