I’m not really sure why I wanted to go to Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp in Poland – it was not the most obvious place to go for an Easter break!
But it was something more than just morbid curiosity. I wanted to try to understand the reality of the mechanistic killing of over a million Jews which took place there and to explore my own reactions when confronted with the hideous reality of genocide.
Born in 1942, I grew up in a small provincial town in the East Midlands. Although the Second World War was very real for us – surrounded as we were by American Air Force bases – the enormity of the Holocaust didn’t really enter our consciousness until well into the 1950s. And it was not taught or talked about during my Grammar school years right up to 1960.
Although I am neither Jew nor Christian, I think there was also an element of atonement in my trip – a wish to express my personal outrage at the enormity of the wickedness of cold, systematic murder.
Upon my return I find I have difficulty in processing and coming to terms with what I have seen and learned about those frightful wartime years in Poland. Writing this is, I think, part of that process. I don’t want to write a tour guide – there’s plenty of information readily available on the Internet. Instead I want to explain my reaction to what I saw and heard – things I shall remember and ponder on for a long time to come.
What I am about to describe happened at the time of Israel’s retaliation to the 7 October attack by Hamas in 2023. But it was what happened much closer to home that made an impact on me and which might well have been the trigger which led me to Auschwitz.
Earlier this year, a Code of Conduct complaint was made against a high-profile local councillor – a Muslim – whom I have known for years. The complaint was of anti-Semitism. The councillor had voiced the classic anti-Semitic arguments which have been used for centuries to “justify” violence against the Jews: That the Jews killed Jesus; and that there was a Zionist plot to rule the world.
I was taken aback by such cant and viciousness from this high-profile local personality. Being a personal contact and it happening in my own local circle suddenly made anti-Semitism real and part of the “here and now”. It’s a very short step from the anti-Semitic comments made in one’s own community to religious persecution.
Upon reflection, there was, perhaps, an even more “close to home” driver. My wife of 43 years died in September last year, and after a very difficult few months I wanted to have a break somewhere over Easter this year.
But everywhere I thought of would carry hurtful memories of my wife. Then the incident with the councillor happened, bringing to mind all that it did. I knew that with her gentle and loving nature, my wife would never want to visit such a dreadful place as Auschwitz, so I think those two themes came together to decide for me to make what turned out to be something of a pilgrimage.
There are two camps about an hour’s journey from Krakow: Auschwitz itself and, about a mile away, the industrialised killing centre of Birkenau where between one and one-and-a-half million Jews were murdered in little more than two years.
Auschwitz is entered via the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate and the museum there contains many disturbing exhibits including the luggage and personal possessions of the last trainloads of victims; items which had not yet been sent back to Germany when the camp was finally abandoned early in 1945 as the Russian Army closed in.
There are piles of cooking pots and utensils (victims had been told to take with them what they would need for their “new lives after resettlement”); luggage of all kinds – carefully marked with the names or addresses of their owners; spectacles; prosthetic limbs; and human hair shorn from the victims of the gas chambers, some of it woven into a fabric.
Amongst the displays was a pile of shoes and there jumped out at me the sight of a small child’s very faded red shoe. I was stunned and shocked to a standstill in front of the display cabinet. Here was a direct and intimate connection with a real child – almost standing in front of me – who had been led to their death by their, perhaps unsuspecting, mother. That child looked at me across the years. Here was reality.
Amongst other horrors to be seen in Auschwitz, there remains a small gas chamber where the use of Zyklon B cyanide pellets had been pioneered. Unlike the large gas-chamber at Birkenau, it is intact and to stand in the very place where thousands of people were murdered was a frightful, chilling experience.
The Nazis realised that a larger-scale and more efficient killing process was required to deliver their mass-extermination plans of the “Final Solution to the Jewish question” and it is at Birkenau where the mind-blowing industrial scale of the killing of Jews and other undesirable ethnicities, such as Romas, strikes home. Up to 2,000 people at a time could be murdered in the large Birkenau gas chambers. Murder by the trainload.
The Auschwitz museum contains some remarkable photographs of people being unloaded from a train onto the infamous “ramp” at Birkenau with the obscene selection process already in progress. Probably taken from a guard tower, the photos show confused and anxious people but the scene is very orderly – no panic or violence of any kind. Clearly, the arrivals had been carefully persuaded that they were being “resettled” in a work camp.
Even standing on that very ramp shown in those photographs where Jews from across Europe were offloaded, it is difficult to come to terms with the realisation that the majority of them would be dead in the next hour or so as a result of a casual, off-hand, life-or-death decision taken in a couple of seconds. That this is so far outside any understanding of human norms of morality and that it happened in the very place I was standing was almost incomprehensible.
Although the Nazis blew up the undressing room, gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau in an effort to destroy the evidence of their crimes as the Russian advance neared the camp, the ruins can still be accessed and one stands before them mesmerised, humbled and angered.
Again, despite being at the very site where all this took place, it is difficult to grasp the horror, evil and extent of the cold, casual routine of murder which took place there only 80 or so years ago – just as my own life was beginning.
This is the reality of genocidal anti-Semitism. This is maniacal Fascism. This is routine State-backed mass murder, planned and conducted on a systematic industrial scale. This is pure evil and wickedness and it really happened. Perpetrated by real people against other people they judged inferior and undesirable; and it is, alarmingly, recent history.
Of course there have been genocidal killings around the world since then. Sparked by racial, religious and cultural differences and fuelled by fear and ignorance, they are a depressingly regular occurrence through history.
I’m glad I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I experienced astonishment, sadness, outrage and other sentiments I haven’t come to terms with yet. And great depression at the evidence of man’s inhumanity to man and the feeling that evil lies just beneath the surface in a great many of us.
I was gratified to hear that visiting Auschwitz and learning about the Holocaust is a part of the school curriculum for Polish children. I wish it was possible for all young people to visit. We must not allow what happened at Auschwitz and similar camps to simply fade into history.
I have not previously been engaged with Holocaust Day. Now I shall be.
Photo: Prisoners are sorted and selected by Nazi personnel on the railway platform at the entrance of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, Oswiecim, Poland, 27 May 1944. The Auschwitz camp was established by the Nazis in 1940, in the suburbs of the city of Oswiecim which, like other parts of Poland, was occupied by the Germans during the Second World War. The name of the city of Oswiecim was changed to Auschwitz, which became the name of the camp as well. Over the following years, the camp was expanded and consisted of three main parts: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz. Red Army soldiers liberated the few thousand prisoners whom the Germans had left behind in the camp on 27 January 1945. (Photo by Yad Vashem Archives/AFP via Getty Images.)
Richard Britton is retired and serves as an elected County Councillor.
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