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  :)

The Introduction Seminar

During the introduction seminar we discussed things like what we were expecting to see during the trip, the emotions we were expecting to feel, heard a survivor’s testimony and learnt a bit about the background to the holocaust. We also concentrated on seeing the human side of the people who were involved in Auschwitz and the Holocaust, as it’s very easy to hear the statistics and not think about the human suffering and individual stories behind the numbers. This included the perpetrators as well as the victims, as it’s very easy to think of them as some sort of monsters who are nothing like you and I.

The survivor who gave her testimony was 85 year old Kitty Hart-Moxen. She was sent to the Auschwitz labour camp when she was 16 for being Jewish, and both she and her mother survived the two years they spent there. She has written two autobiographies, ‘I am Alive’ and ‘Return to Auschwitz’, and filmed a DVD which we watched a section of, in which she returns to Auschwitz with her son David and tells him about her experiences. What struck us most after hearing Kitty speak was her spirit and perseverance. Whilst telling us about her experiences, things like seeing dead bodies, which we would personally find very shocking and traumatic, were just ordinary occurrences in Auschwitz, and people had to get used to it. Kitty was a very vibrant woman, and her testimony really helped us to start to understand that every single person who was sent to the concentration camps in the Second World War was an individual with lives and experiences before the Holocaust. This may seem an obvious thing to say, but it is easy to hear the words ‘six million Jews were killed’ and not stop to think about how absolutely overwhelming that number is, and what that really means.

We also discussed issues such as whether photography should be allowed inside the camp and whether it was appropriate for former concentration camps to become tourist attractions.


-Sarah

Who Are We?

Aggie and I were offered the chance to go to Auschwitz in Poland for the day as part of the government organised ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’, or ‘LFA’ project. The aim of this scheme is to allow two people to go and have the experience of Auschwitz first hand, and then tell their peers and communities about their trip, therefore educating and passing the messages and lessons learnt from the day to a larger group. It is based on the hypothesis that ‘hearing is not like seeing.’

The aims of the LFA project are,

·         To enrich understanding of the holocaust and the role played by such camps as Auschwitz-Birkenau

·         To appreciate that all involved in the holocaust were individual human beings

·         To begin to learn the lessons of the Holocaust so that we may pass them on to others and use these lessons in our everyday lives.

We went on the 31^st March 2011, and had an introduction seminar where we were prepared for what we would experience before we went, and a follow up seminar afterwards to discuss what we saw and what we were going to do next.


-Sarah