By Natalie Jones and Joelle Way

In April, bright and early, Joelle and I boarded a plane to Krakow, Poland. Why? We were taking part in a ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’ trip to visit the most infamous site of the holocaust: Auschwitz-Birkenau. To be honest I did not know what to expect. From history lessons I knew that it is estimated that 11 million people were murdered in the holocaust, approximately 2 million just in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but it is impossible to conceive such a large, unbelievable number. It just does not seem real when you study it in history; it seems just like some distant event we are in no way connected to, and there are so many questions that form in your mind when you learn of the terrible things that happened. How could people let such atrocities happen? I thought that I was going so that I could humanise victims I had learnt about, so that I could really understand what had happened and so that I could learn at a more personal level what Auschwitz-Birkenau really was like. There was so much to take in during the trip so I will only mention the most poignant things that affected me personally.

When we arrived in Krakow we travelled to a small town known as Oświęcim, where there is a Jewish cemetery. It was full of old, worn  gravestones covered in moss and weeds. You look closer and realise that there does not seem to be much order to the gravestones. The Nazi occupation of the town meant that they used the gravestones for paving slabs, not paying any respect to whoever was buried underneath. After the war there were attempts at restoring the graveyard but obviously there is no way of telling whether the gravestone corresponds to the right person underneath. It seemed so heartbreaking but perhaps the most moving thing was that even today you have to get special permission to visit the cemetery because there is still a fear of vandalism.

The next stop was Auschwitz 1 which was originally army barracks. The camp had a really quiet and eerie atmosphere to it. It was small – perhaps the size of the size of the Charters school site with regular buildings.

We went inside the buildings which have now been converted into museums. In each were displays of various things found when the camp was liberated. Perhaps the most disgusting was a room full of human hair shaved of the thousands of people who had been brought to the camp. The hair was piled high, tonnes upon tonnes, some of the hair cut particularly from little girls and women still looked like plaits or ponytails with ribbon and hair ties still visible. In other rooms were personal belongings which had been confiscated from the people who had entered. Perhaps the most poignant thing about these belongings was that they had never been collected by their owners – suggesting that the owners had never left the camp. There were spectacles and false legs, makeup, eyelash curlers, pots, pans, cheese graters, a huge room full of people’s shoes, photographs and piles of suitcases with names on them… We were told that the people who had been forced into the camp had only been allowed one suitcase of belongings. We were encouraged to think of the things that we would have brought with us if we were faced with the same situation. Would we have taken our favourite shoes as well? I was really upset by the belongings as they were so recognisable. Shoes, makeup, hairbrushes… You really got a sense of how these people must have felt and how vulnerable these people were made to feel, without their glasses, without makeup, without their photographs. Everything was taken from them. They were no longer humans when they entered the camp.

In Auschwitz 1 there was one gas chamber which you were allowed to walk through. I remember hesitating before I went in trying not to think that thousands of people had been brutally murdered and had never left this building. The room was dark, dingy and hot and as soon as I entered it I wanted to get out. It was claustrophobic. You could see scratches at the door, worn patches of floor; you could see where the gas would have fallen. I walked as quickly as possible through that room, struggling like many others on the trip, to come to terms with the injustice of the act that I was able to leave that room but many others had not been so lucky.

The third and final part of the trip was to go further out and visit the second part of the camp. Auschwitz II better known as Birkenau. This was different from the first as it was primarily a death camp. The infamous railway track leads directly into the camp.

 If you were fit, healthy or just lucky then you would stand a chance of being made to work in Auschwitz II of being put in charge of the dirty work that the Nazis did not feel like doing. The stable like structures made living conditions not even fit for animals. The sanitation was appalling, there was no privacy, the food received was not even a third of what they should have received and you did not even get a bed to yourself but often shared with four or more others.

If you showed any signs of weakness, were old, pregnant or just not capable of hard work you were sent to the gas chambers straight away. There were four gas chambers at Birkenau, all of them now destroyed as the Nazis tried to cover up their work. What I found incredibly sinister was the fact that these gas chambers had artificial shower heads on so everyone would think that they are going to have a shower. As soon as people were crammed inside the chambers the doors closed and the gas was poured in. the more ‘privileged’ prisoners had the task of emptying the gas chambers once everyone was dead and scrounging what they could off their bodies, even gold teeth.

We walked across the camp to a building where people not selected for death were registered. The camp was deadly quiet. I had heard before going that you cannot even hear a bird sing in Birkenau. I don’t think that I heard any sound other than the wind and our group talking. The site was huge, rows upon rows of animal sheds and structures where prisoners lived. You would be lucky to survive the weather in these shacks, let alone the Nazis.

There was one story of a prisoner who had rebelled by keeping a diary which he buried every day. The following line really moved me:

‘We will bury our notebooks and diaries deep under the ashes. We have done as much as we could. And you? – searching for the truth. You who have lived to see justice and liberty. What will you do?’

This moved both Joelle and I as it seemed to speak directly and forces you to be grateful for the time which we currently live in. It inspires you to live up to this victim’s expectation: To search for the truth but to promote justice and liberty also.

The most disturbing thing about the entire trip was that although I was able to see the way that the prisoners were treated, and through the displays of confiscated pictures and belongings I was able to humanise and personalise the huge number of victims, I also inevitably had to face up to the fact that the persecutors, the Nazis, were just as human as me also. I was disturbed to find that Nazi officials lived right next door to gas chambers with their families and young children in Auschwitz I. I was horrified to discover the way in which they had so easily treated Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other prisoners. But I was most horrified to discover and to realise that actually, yes, it could have easily been me as the victim, caught up in the terror of being an Auschwitz prisoner, but it could easily have been me caught up in the regime and willingly allowing people to die brutal deaths because I considered them lower than me. The extremity of discrimination and violence was poignant and moving. We like to think the Nazis were all monsters but in fact what Joelle and I both discovered was that they were exactly like us.

Therefore I feel it is vital that we remember the terrible number of people who were lost, that we remember the children that never grew up, the mothers that never got to say goodbye to their children, the sons who were worked to death, and the fathers that were killed brutally and had to watch their whole family being torn apart. But it is just as vital to remember that ordinary people committed such atrocities. Genocide, hatred and prejudice have not been eradicated yet. Far from it. There are genocides all over the world, hatred even in this country, this town, this school. It is our job as the next generation to take a stand against history and not to allow it to be repeated. If we forget, it will happen again. We must learn from the past. We must learn the lessons from Auschwitz.