The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Nazi horrors seen close up
Michael Alexander joined Fife and Tayside school pupils on a day trip to the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in Poland to learn about the horrors of the Holocaust.
I’m in total shock. I can’t believe how many people were here... walking to their deaths.
KELSEY HARVEY
The heartfelt wail of the Hebrew prayer rang out into the darkness just yards from the ruins of a crematoria. More than 70 years ago it was destroyed by fleeing Nazis as they attempted to cover their tracks in the face of the advancing Red Army.
The powerful reading honoured the martyrdom of the estimated six million souls who were murdered, tortured, burned, starved and worked to death at Auschwitz, Belsec, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka and other extermination camps in Europe.
And for the 200 Scottish schoolchildren and their teachers huddled before Rabbi Barry Marcus in the biting cold as they waited to light candles of remembrance, it was a moving finale to a day which explored the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp’s dark history.
Overwhelmed
It is easy to be overwhelmed by the figures which surround the Holocaust.
On this one site alone, at least 1.2 million people are believed to have been exterminated, including one million Jews, 75,000 Poles, 21,000 Sinti and Roma and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war.
One way to understand the history is to personalise the past through the stories of individuals and families who suffered and died here.
That is the approach of the Holocaust Educational Trust’s (HET) Lessons from Auschwitz project, which, for 16 years, has brought together pupils from schools across the country to visit the extermination camps and pass on their impressions in their schools and communities when they return home.
It made for a day of heavy reflection for the pupils.
A very early morning flight from Glasgow to Krakow was followed by a coach journey to the first stop – the Jewish cemetery in the village of Oswiecim, better known as Auschwitz.
Here, 7000 of Poland’s then 3.3 million Jews lived before the war. Now, not one of Poland’s remaining 20,000 Jews lives in the village.
And yet 15 years after the village’s last Jew died, random anti-Semitic attacks on the cemetery continue.
“It’s interesting you can have antiSemitism without Jews,”said HET educator Martin Winstone, hosting our group. “It’s depressing.”
Students then toured the former barracks and crematoria at the nearby death camp, Auschwitz I – its starvation blocks, torture chambers and piles of belongings seized by the Nazis a sharp contrast to the crisp sunny day outside.
Here, display cabinets are filled to the brim with possessions seized from inmates as they entered – children’s shoes, hairbrushes, spectacles, prosthetic legs.
One of the most disturbing sights was the room-sized glass cabinet piled high with human hair. It represented the last shreds of dignity shorn from millions of women.
Kelsey Harvey, 16, from Braeview Academy in Dundee said: “I’m in total shock. I can’t believe how many people were here 70 years ago, walking to their deaths.”
Samuel Hill, 17, of Forfar Academy said: “I didn’t realise the scale of it until I got here.”
Killing centre
If Auschwitz I is about what you see, then neighbouring Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, is about what you don’t see. It was the main killing centre and the immediate impact is its vastness.
Students visited the remnants of once rat-invested barracks, crematoria and gas chambers and heard tales of squalor, cruelty and mass murder.
The site includes the iconic rail spur, built in 1944, where trainloads of men, women and children from across Europe were offloaded and either sent to work as slaves or, more likely, despatched straight to the gas chambers.
It was at this spot that the pupils heard the heartbreaking testimony of one Romanian survivor, Elie Wiesel, who recalled: “An SS officer… gave the order: ‘Men to the left! Women to the right!’ Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight short simple words. Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother.”
As darkness fell, Rabbi Marcus, the founder of the Government-backed Lessons from Auschwitz trips, gave a passionate speech, telling the youngsters that in order to remember every one of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s 1.2 million victims, the group would have to stand in silence for two years.
Denouncing Holocaust deniers, he said Auschwitz was a warning to the world of what can happen if prejudice and intolerance is left unchallenged. However, it was also a celebration of life, freedom and human defiance.
It was sobering for pupils to reflect that for the majority of Auschwitz visitors there was no return ticket.
Carnoustie High School’s Fiona Muirhead, 17, said: “People were treated worse than animals. Facts and figures are one thing but these were real people.”
Agata Zydel, 16, of Kirkcaldy’s Viewforth High School, added: “Just sitting in a classroom and reading a history book, you have no idea how bad it was.”