09/07/2007

When I was very young – about 5 years old – there was a programme called “All Our Yesterdays”. From recollection, it showed newsreels dating from 25 years ago in that week. Mostly, it showed grainy, jumpy, black and white film of furred and cloche hat-clad ladies launching ships, and long-dead nobility riding in open carriages, waving to respectfully cheering crowds lining the streets.

One evening, it was different. There was no jerking, stiff-upper-lipped nobility, or tributes to British craftsmanship sliding proudly into the sea. Instead, I watched puzzled as skeletons, dressed in striped uniforms, staggered towards barbed wire fences and hung on looking out at me. There were children (as far as could be ascertained) as well as adults of indeterminate sex.

I recall that somebody in the room with me suddenly realised what I was watching and tried to switch it off. Another stopped them, saying that even children had to learn what the world was like. We went on to watch as the camera panned to mountainous piles of bodies. I do not recall any of the narration, only the hushed, horrified tones. But this was the film of the opening of that most notorious of concentration camps, Belsen; that it could be described in any terms remains a wonder.

Over the coming years, I learned more about the horrors of the concentration camps. To my shame, I learned abut the role of my Roman Catholic Church, and how Vichy French soldiers, perhaps not at the behest of the then Pope, but certainly with no hand raised to stop them, clubbed Jewish mothers with rifle butts to force them to let go of their babies. In my then primary school, I was told that the Jews must suffer “because they murdered Jesus Christ”. I remember then thinking that the merciful God I had been taught about could not have condoned the suffering I had seen for any reason, not even the loss of His Son. When I was studying O Levels, our RS teacher told us that it was believed that Jews must suffer persecution “because it was ordained”. I argued with him, saying that if Christ’s suffering and death had been foretold in the Old Testament, then the Jewish peoples were carrying out God’s will when they called for the release of Barrabas rather than Christ, and should be revered not punished, because how else could God’s Will have been served and our souls saved? I was hushed up quickly and became notorious.

Two years ago, as I write, my daughter, studying for her GCSE history [AS Level], asked me to act as a chaperone on a school history trip: the teachers were both men and there were no female staff available. If a mother could not be persuaded to go, the trip would be cancelled. The trip in question was to Poland. Its purpose was to visit Auschwitz I, possibly also the second Camp and the Jewish quarter where ghettos had been built during WWII. I readily agreed to go.

As we got near to Auschwitz I, I became nervous. After all, in the intervening years, we have been able to (although I never have) watch a man fall to his death from the World Trade Centre. We have seen photographs of a naked child running down a dirt road in Vietnam, aflame with Agent Orange, although I believe she survived. Had I become desensitised to suffering over the years? If not, how would I react? Crying, I told myself, would be trite. I would not cry. As a precaution against tears, I put my sunglasses on. Auschwitz I is now a museum. Would what (as I anticipated it to be) a soulless, artfully arranged exhibit convey of the horror perpetrated there? Worse, would I simply be left untouched by it all, shrugging it off as something that happened ten years before even I was born?

The area in which the camp is set is itself, soulless enough. Litter and abandoned domestic rubbish filled whatever parched green spaces are around, although the houses and low-slung blocks of flats are tidy enough. It looks like what is probably is; a relic of a pre Berlin-wall residential area.

The Camp looks very normal. It could be the setting for any war-time exhibit of how the military lived. The approach was lined with dry, leafless trees. Birds did not sing.

The green, well-watered square outside the gates looks normal as well. It is only when you approach the sign that you learn this executions took place here, by firing squad. There were gallows nearby. The group went quiet, as we started to take in the enormity of what we were about to see. Was there time to walk away? Would I ever live with myself if I did?
 

The explanatory sign did not attempt to whip up any emotion. It did not blame anybody. It was simple and dignified. It offered no explanation, no fervour. It merely stated what had happened. That was the keyword for the whole day there. Dignity, simplicity, sadness and, above all, human courage.

The gates bear the legend “Arbeit Macht Frei”, or “work makes (one) free.”

We entered. Along the walls of the foyer were great rolls of names, some in red. The names in red were those who are known to have survived the Camp. There were not many. Tears started to prick my eyes, and I shoved my sunglasses on more firmly. The tears were not maudlin, I was glad to note. They were caused by the shock of the reality, after all these years of having it contained inside my imagination. I would not be left untouched by what I was about to see. For that small mercy, much thanks.

To convey all of the horrors of the Camp would take pages and pages. There is no need. It is all laid out elsewhere. Visit its web-site, or read about it on Wikipedia. It was an old army barracks, abandoned by the time the SS took it over. It remained largely an administrative centre, after the majority of the inmates were sent to Birkenau II and other satellite camps, built to ease the overcrowding in Birkenau I, as well as to provide improved methods of mass extermination.

I was surprised to learn that the original purpose of the Camp was not to murder Jews. That came much later, from 1942 onwards. It was intended originally as a concentration camp for the Polish peoples, Russian POWs and dissidents generally. Nevertheless, over 90% of those murdered in this, the largest of the Camps, were Jews.

I had primed myself for the clinical nature of the Nazi way. The Camp would be run with clinical businesslike efficiency. The reality was shocking beyond all telling. It was not run like a business. It was run as a business.
 

The Nazis had decided that Poland would become an Aryan paradise and the Polish people (at least its non-Aryan population) its slaves and animal stock. Systematically, they had begun to dismantle Polish society at every level; its bourgeoisie; its intelligentsia; its priests; its academics; its teachers. Even village schoolmasters who, presumably, taught the village children their letters and numbers were not spared. Photographs showed people in business suits being rounded up after a normal working day and marched off with their hands over their heads. Men and women – some no older than the group of schoolchildren I was escorting – were hung from lampposts, in one case a man with his neck grotesquely stretched to what must have been almost a foot long. However, this way of dismantling a society was, presumably, too resource-hungry. There had to be a more efficient way. And so the gas-chambers began their existence.

As you and I would – hoping no doubt for promotion and glory – work out how to increase the throughput of work through our section or department, so did the SS. Their throughput was not paper, or widgets, or sales; it was the death and destruction of entire nations.

Originally, wooden wagons were used, with exhaust gases pumped in. Later, the cyanide-based gas used in the chambers – Zyklon B, developed under patent from IG Farben – was used. Photographs showed bodies being pulled out of the wagons as the next batch were lined up outside watching.
 

Other photographs (mercifully blurred) were of young children, misshapen from experiments and with strange marks that seemed like holes in their abdomen. There was a clear photograph of a young boy in a pressurised container being slowly crushed to death as part of an experiment to determine how much pressure the human body could take. A group of soldiers bent over, hacking a Polish man to death with machetes, while officers stand nearby, talking, laughing and smoking, but not paying any attention otherwise. Another puzzled me at the time. Head and shoulders of a man, in a striped business jacket, whose head was slightly above the level of the German officers next to him, and which was bent forwards. He was not looking at them, was obviously still alive and he wore a strange, concentrated expression on his face. Later on, I realised what was happening to him, but I will relate that when it is time.

Each of the old barrack buildings contained exhibits. Most people will be familiar with them from TV. What is not ever apparent, until you are there, is that they are housed in glass cases that must be almost 20 feet deep and the length of a room. The shoes – not pairs, just singles, there is not room enough for pairs – the luggage, each marked (in God’s name, why?) with its owner’s name and destination, hairbrushes, shaving brushes, combs. Clothes, even patched and worn through, some so tiny from newborns.

Women’s hair, used to make cloth, and for which German manufacturing industry had to pay; bales of the rough Hessian-type material the hair was woven into was displayed, labelled and priced up.

There is an old saying about not wasting anything from a pig, not even its squeal. That dictum was applied by the SS to human beings.

Everywhere, the mind-numbing, horrible efficiency with which human beings were despatched to their death and destruction. The records meticulously kept in beautiful handwriting, of those able to work, the photographs of the working inmates, with their numbers and marks to identify their ethnic group, or the fact they were homosexuals or other “deviants and criminals”. All this, even though the average life expectancy in the Camp was three months, given the work and the inhumanely low levels of calorie intake. The photographs of handsome men and pretty girls gave way to those where it was impossible to tell the sexes apart, so aged and wasted were they.

The punishment cells. Tiny, airless – one in particular had been the place where many prisoners suffocated to death, candles often being lit to use up oxygen and speed death. Yet there was evidence of human courage. The Polish priest who suffocated in the cells to take the place of a another prisoner; the Polish cavalry officer who whiled away his imprisonment carving pictures of the Sacred Heart (a Roman Catholic holy effigy) and a depiction of Calvary, where Christ was crucified. They are untouched, just covered over with sheets of glass to preserve them.

The gas chambers. Long, rectangular rooms, still showing the marks made as dying inmates clawed at the walls, floors and ceilings as the gas pumped in. They had been told they were being showered for lice – after all, a panicking group takes resources to control and there is no use in wasting resources. Let them think something useful is happening and they will go quietly enough. As though they had a choice.

Strangely enough, a group of Japanese visitors stalked out of the gas chamber, ostentatiously holding their noses against the smell. What had they expected?

Finally, I realised what the photograph was that had puzzled me earlier – the man whose strangely-angled head was above everybody else’s, even though he was obviously shorter than everybody else in the photograph. In a courtyard, where flowers lay and candles burned, was the place where selected inmates had been hanged, beaten and shot. A notice asked us to be quiet and reverential in that place of death. There was no need. Everybody, of whatever race, nationality or creed, wore the same disbelieving, haunted expression and walked, even in groups, in silence or in hushed conversation. No voices were raised. Nobody laughed, bar one woman in another group. It was incongruous and misplaced. She was obviously trying to agree or disagree politely with someone, perhaps the group’s guide, but what was there to politely laugh about, or agree and disagree with?

In the courtyard there was a post, standing about two feet higher than my head, so about seven feet or so in height. There was a large metal ring set at the top and rigging down the post behind it. On here, or something like it, the man in the suit jacket had obviously been hung from his wrists, with his hands tied behind him. That was why his head hung at a strange angle, as his body tipped downwards under his own weight and his shoulders dislocated. Why was his expression so concentrated? Was he trying not to cry out, or was he just so shocked he could not move his facial features? I gently touched the post with the barest part of my fingertip and sent a prayer. I did not pray to the Roman Catholic God, or to the Jewish Yahweh, or to any known (or unknown) deity. I prayed to the compassionate Being that must have wept bitterly, and still must, as these atrocities are repeated, daily, and world-wide.

Finally, we left the exhibition. We had not had time to see it all. We did not visit Auschwitz 2; again there was no time and it was about 5 miles away.

Before we left the Camp, we had to pass through a smallish, darkened room. Around the walls were benches, and in the centre on the floor was a large mirror. Candles burned quietly on the mirror. The room was silent. There was a large knob set into the wall. There was no requirement to stay in the room, you could simply walk through it and out. We sat and stayed, and somebody pressed the knob. A beautiful voice started singing in Yiddish; eventually, words came that some of us could follow. The cantor was singing the names of the death camps.
 

Everybody who was at Auschwitz that day can relate their own tales of what they saw and how it affected them. They will all be different. They will disagree with me over points of detail and you can easily point out historical inaccuracies in my tale, and horrors I have omitted. That cannot be helped. This is the recollection of one person who remains profoundly affected by what she saw and learned, not a historical narrative.

It was a long journey, from that first newsreel until I emerged, shocked and blinking into the brilliant Polish sunlight forty five years later. I do not believe I could ever make it again.

Is the Camp a place of nightmares? Of course it is. I have never read Schindler’s List or watched Sophie’s Choice. I probably now never will.

If you can bear to, visit Auschwitz. It is a sacred place, a holy place. It contains more of the soaring human spirit - whether born of heroism or of the darkest despair of those who have lost everything - than any cathedral in the world. Photographs can be seen on http://www.auschwitz-birkenau.org/. They bring back memories, are mostly accompanied by written narrative and were made by Bill Hunt, who worked on Schindler’s List. Beautiful music by Arvo Part accompanies them.

Visit them all.