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Tracks of TEARS
It’s not easy viewing, but as Chris Tarrant writes, his trip along the railways used by the Nazis is one he’ll never forget
We travelled first class, but my companion had made this journey before in very different circumstances. The remarkable Helga Weissova was 12 when, in December 1941, she was forcibly put on a train following this very route, from the Czech capital Prague to the small town of Bohusovice. She and hundreds like her were crammed like sardines for the one-hour journey. Their ultimate destination? Hell, pretty much.
Helga bravely agreed to make the trip with me again for my TV documentary about the role the railway system played in the Holocaust. It was one of the most sobering journeys I’ve ever made. The rail network had enabled the Germans to transport huge numbers of Jews to death camps with ease, with the tracks leading right up to the gates of camps like Auschwitz, which was where Helga finally ended up.
Helga and her family had first been sent to the ghetto of Terezin, close to Bohusovice, by the Nazis. ‘I remember everything about that day,’ she told me, as we sped through the rolling countryside. ‘There was snow on the ground and the SS men would bark orders at my parents and me.’
One of the most chilling events Helga witnessed at Terezin was a group of Jewish boys having to dig their own graves. Their crime? Writing letters home to their mothers. ‘All were hanged and thrown into the graves; other inmates were forced to bury them.’ One night her father was snatched and sent to a death camp, never to be seen again. Five days later Helga and the other women in Terezin were transported to Auschwitz in Poland. Most were murdered but Helga and her mother survived.
I went to Auschwitz myself on this trip. When I emerged from the gas chamber, I had to take big gulps of air to stop myself from being physically sick. It was the sight of scratch marks high on the walls that tipped me over the edge. Some were over 6ft up the wall. Why, I momentarily wondered. Then it dawned: panic had set in as the chamber began to fill with gas. As everyone desperately sought to escape the fumes, the stronger people scrambled over the weaker. But of course there was no escape…
So why was I on this journey? The idea for the programme grew out of my Extreme Railways series, and my desire to know how big a part the railways played in this awful chapter in our history. It’s undoubtedly the most harrowing but worthwhile documentary I’ve ever made. The terrible truth is that the Holocaust could not have taken place without the railways.
After Germany invaded Poland in Above (l-r): Holocaust survivors Helga Weissova and Arek Hersh
1939, Hitler raced his troops and tanks from one country to the next using the railways – each time absorbing the new country’s system into the Nazi rail network so that, eventually, some 1.6 million people were working for Hitler’s Reichsbahn. This civilian army accelerated the near-destruction of the Jewish race in Europe by enabling them to be despatched with such speed to the death camps.
My journey also took me to Berlin, where I visited a depot run by railway enthusiasts who’ve preserved Class 52 Kriegsloks – the workhorse locomotive of the Nazi war machine. Thousands were used to take troops to the front – and millions of Jews to their death. Also in Berlin I visited Grunewald station, from where 50,000 Jews were transported to camps. Today, as a memorial, the dates and destination of the transports, and the numbers of Jews on each, are engraved on one of the platforms. On the Polish leg of my trip I met another death camp survivor, Arek Hersh, who was offered sanctuary in England after the war and carved out a new, happy life here. For years he had nightmares about Auschwitz yet he still agreed to return with me to visit the ghetto in Lodz, Poland, where he was incarcerated, and then Auschwitz itself, where he nearly perished.
On arrival at the concentration camp he’d found himself in a queue of mothers, children, the elderly and the infirm. The other queue, to the right of him, consisted of able-bodied men and older teenagers. ‘I sensed I was in danger and had to f ind a way out,’ Arek explained. So when there was a sudden commotion involving a pregnant woman, he switched queues. At the front, he was asked his age –‘17,’ he lied. He was 14. ‘Your profession?’ ‘I’m a locksmith,’ he lied again. That quick thinking saved Arek’s life. Everyone in the lefthand queue was gassed. But those in the other queue were spared – for the time being at least – because the camp commandant thought they might be of use to the Nazi war economy.
Arek showed me around the wooden hut where he’d slept on bare plywood. ‘People died in the night, and every morning they went around with a cart and collected the bodies,’ he recalled. And he remembered Auschwitz’s chimneys burning day and night…
The advance of the Soviet army in January 1945 forced the Germans to abandon Auschwitz, and Arek and his fellow inmates were forced on a ‘death march’ – 15,000 perished as they made the 40-mile journey in freezing temperatures to the town of Loslau, where they were put on trains to other camps. Thankfully, in May 1945 the war in Europe came to an end, not a moment too soon for starving Jews like Arek in death camps across the continent.
I won’t pretend this documentary is easy viewing, and I was left with some unanswered questions such as, how could all the people who worked on the railway collude with the Nazis in the murder of millions of Jews?
But with so many recent headlines about anti-semitism, none of us should ever forget the evil that, at its most extreme, such hatred and bigotry led to. We owe that at the very least to all those who died. Hitler’s Holocaust Rai lways With Chris Tarrant is available on Channel 5’ s catch- up service My5.
‘Lying about his age saved Arek’s life’