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On Auschwitz visit
infamous tracks and standing on the platform where prisoners would arrive and undergo selection.
Doctors, including Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, would pick out those fit for hard labour – while the rest would be taken immediately to the gas chambers for extermination.
Many others, packed into windowless railway carriages like animals, did not survive the horrendous train journey to the camps. Auschwitz guide
The testimony of one survivor, Josef Perl, revealed that as his wagon arrived in Auschwitz and was being unloaded, “a mother was giving birth to her baby, she was pushed to the ground and an SS guard grabbed the baby, cut the cord and threw it unceremoniously to one side like rubbish”.
Showing us the room where the prisoners were stripped, not only of their clothes but their last remaining shreds of dignity, shaved and tattooed with a number and effectively dehumanised, our guide explained: “When they left this room they became a number. They became nothing.”
As we approached the end of the tour, we came to a room lined with photographs,once owned by prisoners who perished here.
Families laughing, enjoying holidays, celebrating weddings, real people living real lives.
As the sun set over AuschwitzBirkenau, we gathered at the memorial next to the gas chambers, blown up by the Nazis days before the camp was liberated in an attempt to conceal their atrocities.
A ceremony of remembrance was led by Rabbi Shaw who told of his grandfather, deported to Poland and killed by the Nazis.
His grandmother escaped and found refuge in Glasgow where her daughter attended Shawlands Academy before growing up and having a family of her own.
“If you were silent for one minute for every person who was killed in the Holocaust, you would be silent for 11 and a half years,” Rabbi Andrew Shaw told the group.
He encouraged the students to feel hope rather than anger when reflecting on their trip – and to spread the word.
And he was delighted to discover that his earlier statement – of how in one sense the Nazis had won as there were no more Jews in Oswiecim – was wrong. An elderly survivor called Malka, who was born in the town, was visiting with her son, grandsons, their wives and her newly-born great-grandson.
Proving that good does indeed build back up again.