As part of the Holocaust Memorial Trust's Lessons from Auschwitz project, two of our Sixth Form students recently had the opportunity to visit Poland for the day to learn about the history of the Holocaust and the role of camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Here is their report:
We visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Southern Poland on Tuesday 21st of February. The Lessons from Auschwitz project is aimed at re-personalising the numbers we are prone to overlooking when considering the atrocity of the Holocaust. Six million is an incomprehensible number of deaths, but the project aims to show that the millions of Jews, Roma and Sinti people, people with disabilities, Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay people, and Soviet prisoners of war all had livelihoods before they were dehumanised in concentration camps.
Auschwitz is made up of three camps, Auschwitz I, Auschwitz-Birkenau II and Auschwitz-Monowitz III, with each camp serving a different purpose. Auschwitz I was the main camp, initially built to hold political prisoners in 1940. The camp also served as a training centre for SS personnel, who were trained in the ideology and methods of the Nazi regime. Auschwitz-Birkenau II was the largest and most notorious of the Auschwitz camps, constructed in 1941. It was built primarily as an extermination camp, where the majority of the victims were Jews. Auschwitz-Birkenau is how people would picture a concentration camp, similar to camps in the Boy in the Striped Pajamas and Schindler's List. Auschwitz-Monowitz III was a labour camp established in 1942 to provide forced labour by the German company IG Farben. On our visit, we only saw the first two sites.
Visiting the actual camps remains relatively incomprehensible for a number of reasons; the scale of the camps themselves, the number of people murdered and the motivation behind it. Auschwitz-Birkenau II's size is immense. It is over 150 hectares going beyond the horizon; reconstructed wooden barracks stretch both left and right as far as the eye can see. The field is plagued with chimneys where barracks would have once stood and at the bottom of the field sit the ruins of two gas chambers where around 4,000 people would have been systematically killed each day. When embarking on the death marches the Nazis aimed to destroy the whole camp in an attempt to eradicate any memory of the atrocities that occurred.
Auschwitz I isn’t on the same scale but what is held within the buildings is possibly more poignant. Upon entrance, the harrowing sign of Arbeit macht frei (work sets you free) reminds you of what the prisoners thought they were coming to the camp to do: work. Perhaps the most unsettling thing is the hair collected and sold by the Nazis; when the Soviets liberated the camps they uncovered two tonnes of female hair which the Nazis were sending back to Germany to commoditize into household items such as rugs or curtains. The shoes are a key point in Auschwitz as well, particularly the 8,000 children's shoes, which upon looking at you begin to focus on individual shoes. You question what the shoes say about their character, something they were later stripped of. The shoes are a painful reminder that 1 in 5 people murdered in the Holocaust were children.
In Auschwitz I there is a book displaying four million names; the names of the people recorded to have died in the Holocaust. Looking through the book you begin to focus on individual names and remember that they had a life before they were murdered; they aren’t just a number and they have an individual story. Trying to picture six million people is impossible but reading through each name brings life to such a vast number of people. It is easy to get lost in the enormity of the Holocaust and to view the victims as a faceless mass, but the book of names reminds us that every life lost was an individual tragedy.
During the early 1900s, the Germans came to see Jews as a threat to their vision for Germany, viewing them as outsiders who could never truly be part of their nation. The economic turmoil of the time led to resentment and scapegoating of the Jews for causing the hardship of others. As the demonisation of people for economic hardships out of their control returns, it is important to remember the sentiment the Nazis used to whip up antisemitism and to ensure the demonisation of minorities doesn’t creep back into our society. We need to ensure that xenophobia and racist rhetoric of any sort doesn’t escalate or return, we need to unite against it. By learning from the past and working together to promote tolerance and inclusivity, we can create a better future for all.
This was a visit that everyone should do at some point in their lives. We would like to thank Mrs Spruce for the opportunity and to the Holocaust Educational Trust for taking us.
Finley and Stanley, Year 12
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Auschwitz 1
The book recording 4 million names
Children's shoes at Auschwitz 1