Rye’s former Sixth Form girls, Kate and Keziah, shared their thoughts and experiences on the project “Lessons from Auschwits.”
In 2008 February, Kate and I were selected to take part in the Government run project ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’. We were part of a group of two hundred Sixth Form students all chosen from schools in the South East of England to go to the Auschwitz camps to learn and try to understand their importance in shaping the world as we know it. As part of this we attended two group seminars coordinated by the Holocaust Educational Trust to teach us about pre-war Jewish life and to hear the experiences of a survivor of eight concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Josef Pearl.
Of the other two groups, one had gone to a Jewish Youth Centre and the other to a Jewish cemetery to see how the Jewish people celebrated both life and death. Our group stopped in the town of Oswiecim which was a quiet if not very idyllic town and we walked perplexedly up concrete steps, wondering what we were doing here. This ordinary town seemed a long way from what we’d expected and yet the trees we could see were Auschwitz III, only six kilometres from us, so that between 1939 and 1945 people in this town could have seen the smoke rising from the camps. We stood on an expanse of flat ground just off the road, interspersed with a few trees. ‘What was here before the war?’ we were asked. Where we stood had been the site of the Great Synagogue and there had been ten more like it as 80% of the town’s population had been Jewish. The Nazis had taken the town and given it the German name of Auschwitz. There are no synagogues and few Jews remaining in Oswiecim. Shocked by how quickly a whole race had been so successfully erased we walked back down the steps in silence and climbed back into the coaches. Already the enormity of this trip had begun to impinge.
I was sitting in the window seat on the left-hand side of the coach as we pulled off the dual carriage way and into what appeared to be an industrial estate, similar to many on the continent, filled with shops, warehouses and restaurants. We had been warned that the Labour Camp of Auschwitz I had become something of a tourist trap, yet it was not until the coach stopped and we were herded out into a concrete car park surrounded on three sides by tall, barbed wire fences that I realised we had arrived. Imagine eating your lunch looking out over Hell on Earth. ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’: there must be hundreds and hundreds of photos of the gate at Auschwitz I; the words that crown them have become known all over the world, and as I stood in front of them, the bright sunshine and warm breeze seemed to be singularly inappropriate. We were given a tour guide to show us round, and as we walked through the gates and past the Camp’s kitchens surrounded by grass and daisies she explained that this was where the camp band had played their music to ‘welcome’ the new arrivals, this was where each day’s work force had been chosen and where the new consignment of prisoners for the death camp would be separated from the rest and led away.
It is commonly said that there is no birdsong at Auschwitz and it’s true; it was unnaturally silent. The buildings were the old army barracks which were adopted by the Nazis and so were standard dark red brick and each has been transformed; the items found, neatly arranged for spectators and visitors like a museum. Glass-fronted tanks running the length of dim rooms were filled with bags still with names and addresses on them, shoes, razors and toothbrushes, hair and prosthetic limbs. This somewhat safe illusion of a museum was taken from us when we reached Block 11. This building has remained untouched over the past years and is exactly as found when liberated. Block 11 had been the death block. Our Polish guide told us of an occasion when a person had escaped and so ten people were randomly picked to be killed. One young man chosen begged not to be killed as he had a wife and small children. The Nazis allowed his life to be replaced by Maximilian Kobe. Saint Maximilian offered and gave his own life in a starvation chamber to save the young man who went on to survive the war and return to his family. This was just one example of how such humanity and self-sacrifice existed alongside and in the face of such horrors.
What you don’t get from the photographs of Auschwitz- Birkenau is the scale. It’s big. When we arrived at Auschwitz III and ascended the squat, red brick watchtower, as infamous as the gates at Auschwitz I, Birkenau stretched as far as the eye could see. To the right the men’s accommodation, originally stables for the German cavalry; long, low wooden houses which held over one hundred men and boys at one time. To the left the women’s building; a rigid example of German efficiency, row upon row of them. We stepped over the train-tracks and moved among the buildings, the sleeping huts, the toilets, the guard houses. The train-tracks were like a seam holding the two halves of the camp together and growing fainter and fainter until they culminated at the ruins of the gas chambers. There’s a memorial there now. Sometimes it just looks like a pile of rocks but sometimes, from the right angle you can see the people in it. We were told many stories that day but one that I remember particularly clearly was of the Zonderkommanders, the prisoners chosen to work in the gas chambers. They wrote down their stories, sealed them in jars or bottles and buried them in the ashes of the cremated.
We were shown round both camps we visited by one of the Polish guides who are trained by the government to conduct the tours. She seemed to know everything, and as we visited the three graves by the gas chambers erected for all those who died, we asked her how she coped coming here six days a week every week of the year. She told us it was an honour to be able to help commemorate the people who had died and to educate future generations so that the same catastrophe never happened again. She was inspired by the bravery of the Jewish people, the British and the Germans and others who came to visit Auschwitz to learn about their history. At the end of the day all two hundred of us assembled at the top of the train tracks in front of the monument, and Rabbi Marcus conducted a ceremony including the Hebrew Prayer for the Dead. Members of the groups read poems and extracts from diaries of those who had suffered and died at Auschwitz or people who tried to preserve the memory of those who had. Then, in the falling dark we were each given a candle to set down on the train track as we walked the distance back to the watchtower. Standing underneath the gates and looking back in the dark at the disused stone and wooden buildings, the divided symmetry of the men’s and women’s barracks and the candlelight illuminating the tracks on which people were carted into the extermination camp, I considered how lucky we were to be able to walk away.
Kate McBride and Keziah Gardom (Year 12)
