Just pulling up to the car park I feel a nervous apprehension. A lump in my throat. The humour that has accompanied our roadtrip to date no longer appropriate.
Entering the camp there is a silence across the place that even the birds respect.
Visitors speak in hushed voices as though they try not to disturb any spirits that many linger.
Any raised voice or nervous giggle are met with tuts and frowns.
But otherwise you wouldnt know the secrets that this place holds.
The yard looks like an old run down holiday camp. Large brick buildings set in rows. Trees that are thick with fresh green leaves.
When you think of the horrors that this place holds, it a miracle that anything grows.
It astonishes me that there could have been such hate for people based just on their religion or their ethnicity. But then I look at how people treat those with a different coloured skin to their own, or a different sexual preference and I can see how it started.
Just one person with enough hatred spreading fear into the community. It’s so easy to believe their lies, and before you realise you’re condoning their behaviours.
When I first started thinking about what it would be like to visit Auschwitz, I thought of the friendships that would have grown in this place. The commeradary and support the prisoners would have had to help each other get through each day. That it would be something that was out of control of the Nazi guards. A spirit they couldn’t break, and something they must have hated
But I don’t think that was the reality. There wasn’t that silver lining. The reality was many didn’t even last a few hours at the camp. They were herded like cattle from the train to the gas tanks, striped of all their clothing and forced into “showers”.
This was the case for most women and pretty much all of the children and the inferm.
And then there were those few who were selected.
Anyone young, fit and able.
They were forced into work.
Be it farming, building more huts or burning the corpses of those put to death.
I cannot begin to imagine the fear they lived their lives in. Knowing any day could be their last. Watching people they’d seen stepping off the train with such relief and hope, only to get marched into the gas tanks, never to walk out again.
Even being herded around the camp by your tour guided there is a sense that you are nothing but cattle or livestock. And there is an understanding of how the guards quickly disassociated prisoners from being the parent, the lover or the child they once were outside these fortified chain link fences.
The 2 sights that will haunt me longest from my visit to Auschwitz were a single child’s shoe lost in the mound upon mound of discarded adult shoes.
And the case with 11 tons of hair. Knowing this was just a small portion of what was hacked from the women and children, turned into cloth that made the uniforms the SS were so proud to wear.
Whilst the history of this place is not that of my ancestry. It is one that this generation can not forget. Otherwise we will risk history repeating it.