Lessons from Auschwitz – Jim Robinson

Nothing really prepares you physically for a visit to Auschwitz. Any prior knowledge tends to come from grainy black and white photographs, old film footage of the liberation of the camps or aerial views from planes that made it that far towards the end of the war when Italy fell and air bases made that possible. It is difficult to visualise it, get a sense of the scale, and few realise that it is not one but two main concentration camps, Auschwitz I (the main camp) and Auschwitz II (Birkenau) which were very different from each other in many respects but both set up for the same purpose, the extermination of all those deemed ‘undesirables’, many of whom were lucky to last more than a couple of months in appalling conditions. The majority were Jews but there were also political prisoners, Catholics, homosexuals, Roma gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war most of whom were tattooed for identification. There was even a third concentration camp that was part of the Auschwitz complex, known simply as Auschwitz III or Monowitz and the subcamps. My own ‘teachers only’ tour also went to Krakow to the factory of Oskar Schindler, the hero of the film ‘Schindler’s List’ and to Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter in the city and its old synagogue and cemetery. Both visits were useful in gaining a more rounded view of the experience of Jews at the time of the Holocaust.

Pope John Paul II was due to visit Auschwitz II-Birkenau when I went. He would have seen the end of the railway line leading to the barracks which were once stables and the ruins of the gas chambers that systematically killed 1.3 million people between 1940-1945. Great stands had been erected to seat the spectators at the event. People were diverted from Krakow airport to a smaller military airport nearby. Security was tight. Maybe they had been thinking about the ugly confrontation between visitors and Catholic nuns that had taken place previously, sparked no doubt by revelations about the suggested complicity between the Roman Catholic church and the Nazis over the concentration camps. This is one lesson that will always repeat itself, that the scale of genocide and the atrocities committed at Auschwitz generates strong emotions from the Holocaust deniers to the Holocaust survivors, one of whom I knew personally and whose photograph I keep to this day. What is surprising is the scale of the concentration camps, the way they were used as human shields placed next to munitions factories or dumps, the way they escaped detection for so long because they were way beyond the flight capabilities of most allied aircraft being the far side of Poland.

I experienced something of these tensions on my own visit when visiting an exhibition room in Auschwitz I. On one wall was a glass cabinet full of mounds of human hair, shaved from prisoners being taken to the gas chambers. On another wall was a case with a single carpet from whose frayed edges hung what was unmistakably strands of human hair. The plaque nearby explained that the SS used human hair to make carpets, which could last a hundred years. The thought that such carpets might still grace homes of fellow Germans, or that the lampshades made of human skin might still be used would have been bad enough. But for the Jewish visitor who entered the room it was the human hair that was the greatest affront, since it should have been buried not displayed. Friction and unease go with the territory and is to be expected on such a visit it seems. No doubt some of the visitors will be relatives of those who died or who know a personal story as I did. One young couple at Auschwitz-Birkenau had to have a moment to compose themselves when the guide graphically described how SS guards would kill babies born on the train journey to the camp. They knew one of the women to whom this had happened and offered a prayer in her memory. There is a hushed air amongst most of the visitors to these places and one gets the impression that it is probably not best to stay too long.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is more disturbing and larger in scale than the original Auschwitz I where there is a permanent exhibition and lecture theatre. Most school tours take in both and start with Auschwitz I. A full tour of Auschwitz I and II lasts about 6 hours.

I think it is important to prepare yourself let alone school children you might take, which is why I went with a group of other teachers on a preliminary visit. It helped us think through the whole process. There is no doubt that there is no set response to such a visit, nor should one expect that. But our guide did comment that primary school children seemed to cope much better with the visit than older pupils who did know how to react and would therefore tend towards silliness, laughter, inappropriate comments instead of the quiet, sombre mood of the younger children. In our group there was a very loud group of visitors who were told in no uncertain terms by other visitors that they should be showing more respect when we visited the torture chambers prisoners were put in prior to being shot in naked pairs against a wall between the barracks. Similarly, I felt self conscious as I took a photograph of a lone visitor who stood for a few seconds and then silently placed a stone at the top of this wall in memory of one of those shot, a typical way of remembering the dead in Jewish practice. Others had laid wreaths and personal mementos at the base of the wall.

There are the larger lessons one can learn from visiting Auschwitz as a whole. ‘Never again’ is surely the most obvious one, the one that inspired the creation of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. But I would suggest that it is the personal lessons one learns that are the most valuable ones and these will be different for different people. I learnt that doctors like Mengele, the SS doctor at Auschwitz who experimented on Edith, my Austrian Jewish friend whose photograph I see daily, would often come to the camp in the morning but then return to their duties as doctors in the towns and villages as though nothing had happened. I suppose you could argue that the degree of deception was only matched by a form of self-deception that what they were doing was advancing science, that their victims were sub-human and they were doing what was ‘right’. In the same room as the human hair and the carpet were huge blown up photographs of SS officers standing about smoking, laughing, sharing a joke. I wondered who was taking the photograph and what it was intended for and then it occurred to me that these were men who would have sent photographs of themselves back to wives, to loved ones to show what a good job they were doing, a job they believed in and felt was right. It is a memory I will take away with me from the visit, a lesson that I will ponder over.

It is important to realise that everyone will take away something different from a visit to Auschwitz. They will learn something different and respond in a different way. Equally important is giving people the time to think through what they have seen and to be aware that it will generate powerful emotions, particularly amongst young adults, and that there are no easy answers to the questions raised. This is not surprising when visiting such an emotionally scarred site where apparently even the birds did not sing.

Walking away from Auschwitz has to be handled carefully and sensitively. I learnt this the hard way when visiting the Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London. Our school group had had to leave the exhibition in a rush as we had to get back onto the coach, but then we were stuck in London traffic because of a bomb alert. What the Yr11 students had just seen suddenly hit them and they reacted badly. The next time I visited I insisted that all the students sat down at the end before leaving the exhibition and wrote down on the paper provided one thought or feeling about what they had seen and then place it in the box near the exit. That way at least some of the anxiety had been expressed, the experience processed and analysed to some extent and the emotional charge diffused enough to walk away. Emotions of guilt, sorrow, horror, injustice and a myriad of others will undoubtedly surface and will need to be acknowledged. Once acknowledged it should be easier to consider the lessons one can learn from Auschwitz and begin to share these with others.