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Policy Issues>
Holocaust Education Trust visit to Auschwitz
History We Must Never Forget
By
Chloe Lambert
Recreated here with kind
permission from the Wandsworth Borough News (originally
printed November 14th 2007)
Auschwitz
is cold. The biggest camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was built by
the Nazis on farmland the size of seven villages, and the
high barbed wire fences are little shelter from the
unforgiving Polish winds. Thick white mist cloaks the place,
and within five minutes of stepping off the coaches our
bones are aching from the chill.
In thick woollen coats, scarves, and hats, a group of South
London school children silently survey the site where 1.3
million people perished.
They flew here as part of a national scheme that sends two
children from every school in Britain to visit Auschwitz, to
see for themselves the incredible atrocities that took place
under Nazi Germany just 60 years ago.
The children look out across the remains of 300 wooden
stables in which as many as 90,000 people were kept by 1944.
Most were burnt down by the Germans as the Nazi empire
collapsed, but their layout in a grid of perfect lines, can
still be seen.
“Look at all that land,” says 16-year-old Hamza Zaveri from
Ernest Bevin College. “Think how many crops could have been
grown there. Instead..this is architecture designed for
extermination.”
Aristides Bernard-Grau, a sixth former from Graveney School
in Tooting, says: "It renders you speechless. To think
someone, somewhere planned all this and thought - this is
how it's going to happen."
We are taken along a muddy track into one of the barracks,
and the biting cold follows us in. Each barrack was meant
for 52 horses, but the Nazis kept 200 people here, we are
told - two to a bed in wooden bunks.
Birkenau means 'where birch trees grow'. The bare branches
of the trees make black silhouettes on the horizon at the
back of the camp. There, at the end of the railway line, is
the harrowing sight of the shower rooms, the shaving rooms
and the gas chambers.
We walk along the railtrack and stop at the point where
cattletrucks carrying thousands of Jewish families arrived,
having been promised a new life with land and jobs. Instead,
here their fates were sealed by the flick of a Nazi doctor’s
hand. Fathers and husbands were sent to work and mothers,
children, the elderly and the ill were marched the other
way, to the end of the railtrack. The children follow in
their steps, to a place where no one returned from.
We are deep inside Auschwitz now, the sun is setting and the
sky is turning a thunderous dark grey. Looking back we can
see the gloomy orange lights of the towering entrance.
The group wanders the dimly lit rooms where so many
thousands spent their last moments.
In the last one, they find a huge display of photographs,
taken from the Jews by the Germans when they arrived here.
The youngsters are fixated on the pictures, which show
smiling groups of teenagers by rivers and parks, couples on
their wedding days and newborn babies.
“It’s fascinating,” one girl whispers to her friends. “They
had lives, they had families before all this.”
Outside, Graveney pupil Shahailya Stephenson stands in the
cold and reflects. “I always thought the Nazis were inhuman
and had no heart, but this made me realise they were human,”
she says. “They had been brainwashed. It’s frightening. If
you teach people from a very young age to think a certain
way, they will believe it.”
It is late afternoon now and we gather together as a group
next to the crematoria under the pitch black sky. The young
people read poems out loud, and for a minute close their
eyes and pay a silent tribute to all those who died here.
Each child lights a candle and places it on the railtrack as
we walk back out together, some in pairs, but many walking
alone, staring down.
Then we are back in the warmth of the coach, whizzing past
the brightly lit windows of Polish homes.
Vox pop - your reaction
Abdussalam Wali, 16, Ernest Bevin pupil: “It’s a once in a
lifetime experience. I’ve learned that everyone had their
own story. They weren’t just statistics and numbers. The
perpetrators and the victims were just like us. We learn
science, chemistry, biology and technology and pretend it’s
going to save us but most of the time it’s used as a bad
thing.
Hamza Zaveri, 16, Ernest Bevin pupil: “This is history, but
history has repeated itself in Darfur and in Bosnia. Without
understanding your history you don’t know where you came
from or where you’re going. It’s made me think about
standing up to your oppressors.”
Sadiq Khan, Tooting MP: “As a father with two young
children, I was particularly disturbed by the numbers of
children killed in Auschwitz.
The meticulous planning and construction of concentration
camps and death camps, less than 65 years ago and on our
doorstep, demonstrates to me not just the evils of Nazism,
but the importance of honouring the memories of the victims
by never forgetting this man-made holocaust.
I am afraid that events more recently in Bosnia and Rwanda
show that there is still a great deal to be learnt.”
Jim Knight, Schools minister: “Nothing can really prepare
you for the vastness of Auschwitz and the dreary darkness
that it sits in. There was a quote on the wall of one of the
buildings that read 'those who forget history are doomed to
repeat it'. That is why we fund these trips to Auschwitz and
why the Holocaust is a compulsory part of the history
curriculum in schools.”
Shahailya Stephenson, 17, Graveney pupil: “The deceit, to
tell someone they were going to a new life, is
incomprehensible. But it’s almost inspiring. It made me
think about studying, and why I’m doing it. We do it to make
sure things like this never happen again.”
Aristides Bernard-Grau, 19, Graveney pupil: “ I think I'll
wake up tomorrow a changed person. I came here a blank page
and left with lots of moral questions in my head. It makes
you ask, what is the human heart capable of?”
Fact Sheet
Auschwitz was established by the Nazis in 1940 in the
suburbs of Oswiecim, Poland. The mass arrests of Poles under
their regime meant local prisons were full beyond capacity,
and Auschwitz initially functioned as one of many
concentration camps.
The location was chosen because of its central place in the
German empire, and soon the Nazis expanded Auschwitz to an
enormous scale and deported people there from almost all of
Europe. It was composed of a main camp, Auschwitz I, where
15,000 prisoners were kept, and the larger Birkenau camp
which was built in 1941. Here the Nazis built large
extermination apparatus, used to murder large numbers of
people and dispose of the bodies. Many others were forced to
work in extremely harsh conditions and died from exhaustion,
starvation and beatings.
The overall number of victims of Auschwitz in the years
1940-1945 is estimated at between 1.1m and 1.5m people. The
majority of them, and above all the mass transports of Jews
who began arriving in 1942, died in the gas chambers.
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