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
-Sarah
