A DAY TRIP TO AUSCHWITZ

10-05-2007

Dozens of West Midlands teenagers headed to Auschwitz yesterday - courtesy of Gordon Brown. And The Stirrer was with them.

An excursion to World War Two’s most horrific extermination camp, where at least one and a half million souls perished? What a gruesome prospect for day trip.

At the same time, although Auschwitz never appears in those lists of “100 Things To Do Before You Die”, there’s a strong argument that a visit should be a compulsory part of the school curriculum.

The government hasn’t gone that far, but an award of £1.5 million from Gordon Brown to the Holocaust Educational Trust has ensured that at least two pupils from every school in the country can go at a vastly subsidised rate - and youngsters from Birmingham, Dudley, Wolverhampton and Coventry arrived bleary eyed at the airport at 5 a.m. to take full advantage.

Also with them, a cluster of journalists and a couple of local MP’s - Lynda Waltho from Stourbridge and Julie Kirkbride from Bromsgrove.

With teenagers on board, there was a buzzy chatter about the flight, belying our sombre purpose, but on arrival in Poland the mood - and the weather - notably darkened. This was serious business.

On our hour’s coach ride from Krakow airport in the south of the country, we learned that Auschwitz wasn’t, in fact, called Auschwitz. This was a “Germanised” name for a small town called Oswiecim.

In the pre-war years, this modest place had a population of around 12,000 people, a third of whom were Jewish; today, there isn’t a single Jew remaining, although a synagogue has been preserved as a museum of the community’s life in the town.

Here the walls are decorated with photographs from the 1920s and 30s - simple snapshots showing proud mums with new-born babies, family groups parading their new clothes in town, and bathers sploshing about in the local river.

The kind of stuff anyone might have in their family album, in fact - but lent a tragic significance by what we know of their fate.

It was a useful start to the expedition, if only because in the context of six million holocaust victims, you were reminded that behind the numbing, humdrum statistics, these were real people, with ordinary lives that were callously snatched from them.

It was a short journey - for them, and us - to Auschwitz 1; a prison, which became a barracks, and finally a forced labour camp where the Nazi’s experimented with the Final Solution they were later to perfect a few hundred yards down the road at Auschwitz 2 or Birkenau.

The matter-of factness of it all is what’s so chilling.

You walk under the entrance of Auschwitz 1 with it’s chilling slogan Arbeit Macht Frei - “Freedom Through Work” - and traipse through the long dormitories learning about which part of Europe the inmates had come from, how many of them died, and which groups they represented (Romany Gypsys, gay people and Communists as well as Jews).

Without realising it, you are being softened up for the smack in the face you’ve been dreading, but which, when it comes, still delivers an awful, heave-inducing jolt; the sight of a mammoth, room length display cabinet full of human hair shaved from the corpses of the dead.

Next, it’s the galleries of spectacles, suitcases, cooking pots, the artificial limbs gathered from the disabled.

Worst of all are the shoes, mostly blackened by time, but one or two still showing flecks of red or blue; flighty fashion in the midst of industrial-scale murder.

As the father of a three year old daughter, I had a sick, guilty fascination with a pair of tiny children’s shoes; that could have been my girls.

Some of the schoolkids were sobbing; for my own part nausea battled it out with fear and rising anger.

Angry incantations that hardly do justice to the suffering endured by so many escape from my throat - “Fucking bastards, fucking bastards, fucking bastards.” And then “fucking bastards” once more. Not big, not clever, but as raw as it comes.

If Auschwitz 1 is about sensory overload, Birkenau down the road is a quieter, more contemplative place.

Ironic really, because this was the real death factory, with even the normally punctilious Nazis eventually tiring of photographing every inmate, as they careered into the full-on insanity of genocide.

By the end, victims were simply decanted from the train, and sent within minutes to the gas chambers (each had a capacity of around 2,000) before being cremated in the huge furnaces.

Unfortunately, the Germans destroyed most of the buildings as they fled, leaving much of Birkenau as a flat, exposed plain - almost a non-place, hollow and dead.

Amid all this gloom, it was cheering (albeit in a sad kind of way) to note the various moments of revolt from the inmates.

At Crematorium 4, for example, Jewish workers who knew that they were about to suffer the same fate as those whose bodies they had been burning, decided to go out with a bang.

They set fire to the place and caused such a massive explosion that it was put out of commission.

Chatting to the youngsters in our party, it was clear they were overwhelmed by the day; Birkenau covers 434 acres and the vastness of the horror brought history home in a way that even the best books never can.

The day was rounded off with ceremony, where we all lit candles and symbolically walked out of the camp along the railway tracks; a return journey hundreds of thousands were never able to make.

To see The Stirrer’s Auschwitz gallery click here

There will be a podcast of the trip appearing later this month on The Stirrer.

To find out more about the Holocaust Educational Trust, go to http://www.het.org.uk/

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