Chroniclers' Diversion - thoughts on a visit to Auschwitz, 1997

Words are really not enough to express the feel of this place, you have to experience the faces of the dead looking down on you from the photographs on the walls of the Auschwitz museum, carefully numbered and catalogued and see the piles of belongings; shoes, spectacles and human hair.

Our guide to the museum was a rather stern, sad-faced Pole of 66 years who explained that he was a retired chemical engineer whose mother-in-law had died in the camp. He began by telling us the grim statistics of this place. 1,500,000 people killed here, not in an orgy of emotion, like a battle, but by an efficient, planned, killing factory, designed with the sole purpose of disposing of unwanted people, and using the remains in an effective way. Being an Engineer, a designer of machines, and hearing it coming from an Engineer, I found this thought particularly chilling.

To visit Auschwitz 1, where so many came back from a day’s work and died, you must first walk through the gate with the cynical motto over it, “Arbeit mach Frie” (Work makes you free). The initial feeling is one of visiting a tourist attraction, the sight is so familiar. Then you remember the grim statistics, look down the double line barbed wire electrified fence and you begin to feel the horror creep under your skin.

The museum is housed in the original brick barrack buildings, the tour takes you in to a number of these, each one focusing on a different aspect of life and death in the camp. The tour is cleverly designed to give you an increasing level of horror as it progresses. Blocks 12 and 14, -Dr Josef Mengele’s former experimental medical hospitals are closed to the public.

The tour starts with maps of the places where people were taken from, and you see the convenient central location of Auschwitz. People from as far apart as Norway and the Greek Island of Rhodes were “resettled” in this place. It then moves on to show the living conditions in the camp, down corridors of numbered and named portraits of the camp inmates, each with their date of entry and date of death. Dates in most cases separated by 2-3 months.

The rest of the tour passed through pathetic piles of the day to day items of people’s lives. Suitcases, spectacles, shaving brushes, and shoe polish. Each reminds you that these people really did not know their fate. Would you bother to bring shoe polish unless you really believed that you were being re housed?

Nothing was wasted here; useful belongings were given to the good people of the Reich. The soldiers made sure that all belongings were taken and not misplaced on the trip. Everyone knows about the recycling of gold teeth and jewellery, it is almost a symbol of the Holocaust, but what about the recycling of hair to make cloth? The recycling of the ashes of the dead to make fertiliser, shoes to make artificial leather? This was a factory for recycling people.

The wall against which thousands were shot is now a shrine, as if scripted by some director the heavens opened and it snowed violently.

None of the visitors seemed to care.

We moved on to the very place where Father Maximillian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic Priest, now beatified, made the ultimate sacrifice by asking to replace a family man who was sentenced to die by starvation. We visited the cell where he finally starved to death.

The tour ended inside the gas chamber, a converted underground munitions store, our chemical engineer explaining the process in graphic detail.

We were left with the words of Pastor Niemoeller, a Holocaust Victim

“First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists and I did not speak out - because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics and I did not speak out - because I was not a Catholic

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me”