13th November 2008 – a week ago today – was a long and physically gruelling day. All but 24 hours without sleep, charter flights with 200 Sixth Form students and a group of senior faith representatives to and from the Polish city of Kraków, and a day at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
But I’m not complaining. After all the conditions under which I travelled – by train, by plane, by coach – were comfortable and safe, unlike the unimaginably appalling travelling conditions suffered by the uncounted masses who were sent to Auschwitz to be murdered.
Auschwitz I
Many will be familiar with this gate and the slogan that spans between the gate posts: Arbeit Macht Frei – “work makes one free”. The breathtaking cynicism of this slogan in this place cannot escape anyone’s attention.
This is the gate to the first Auschwitz concentration camp. Originally a Polish army barracks in the small town of Oswiecim (sorry, I cannot reproduce the Polish diacritical marks), Germanized as Auschwitz, what happened in this camp marks the beginnings of what was to become one of the most appalling episodes in European and world history.
It is now preserved as a museum.
The place of death
But the mass murders did not take place at Auschwitz I. They took place at the neighbouring camp known as Auschwitz II or Birkenau.
This was the gateway to suffering and death for over a million people, the gate to Auschwitz II.
The two camps are quite close to each other, but their scale is completely different. Auschwitz I is a relatively small, contained area of brick-built barracks. Auschwitz II (Birkenau) is a vast, bleak plain that the Nazis covered in wooden barracks buildings – actually they were prefabricated stables – most of which were destroyed after the war. What now remains, apart from a relatively small number of preserved wooden barracks, is a surrealistic “forest of chimneys”. Each of the barracks huts had a brick-built furnace with chimneys at each end ; the two furnaces were joined by a long flue to carry what little heat came from the furnaces through the building. Needless to say, the prisoners were never given enough wood to keep the heating going through the bitterly cold winters of central Europe.
One minute’s silence – lasting for four years
This one-day visit to Auschwitz in the company of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi and other senior religious representatives offered an opportunity for remembrance and reflection in a place where a modern European state carried out industrialized murder on an almost unimaginable scale.
Rabbi Barry Marcus, one of the guides who accompanied us, pointed out during the brief ceremony of remembrance at the end of our visit that if we were to observe a minute’s silence for each of those who perished at Auschwitz we would be silent for four years.
More than a million people were dragged from their homes and ghettoes all over Europe and sent in long trains of cattle trucks to Auschwitz, brutally separated from their families, and marched into gas chambers, suffocated by a gas used to kill pests, their bodies burned in crematoria designed to despatch thousands of bodies per day.
No-one knows exactly how many died at Auschwitz – why would the Nazi killers keep records of those who were just passing through?
Dead in two hours
As each train pulled into the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, guards opened the doors and forced the transportees out – the dead, the elderly, the disabled, men, women, children, babies – separated men from women and children, marched them past a camp doctor who selected those who could be worked to death, and sent those deemed fit only for the gas chambers on their way to their deaths.
Two hours. That’s what it took. Two hours between arriving at Auschwitz and death. The “final solution:.
Statistics and individual stories
There’s a good reason that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem is so called – in English “a hand and a name”:
And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name (a “yad vashem”)… that shall not be cut off. [Isaiah 56:5]
Statistics are just numbers. But names are words of power. Just think how you respond when someone calls your name in the street.
In German the camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau were known as “Vernichtungslager” – annihilation camps. And that’s just what the Nazis tried to do; they tried to annihilate not only millions of individual Jews, Romani, handicapped, homosexuals, ethnic minorities; they wanted to annihilate even the very memory that Jews and their lives had existed.
But they failed. Thank God they failed!
The people on the transports from Warsaw and Theresienstadt and Prague and Copenhagen and Oslo and all over Europe came with suitcases full of personal effects. They had been told they were being “re-settled”.
The Germans took everything – even tons and tons of human hair – and sent it back to German to be reused. It seems they knew the value of pretty much everything. But they did not know the value of human life.
Each suitcase had the owner’s date of birth. You will notice that Peter Eisler’s date of birth was 20 March 1942 and his suitcase is marked “Kind” – German for “child”.
The museum at Auschwitz I has displays of all kinds of personal effects brought by those about to die.
Braces and crutches and artificial legs.
Shoes. And brushes and combs and household pots and pans.
And children’s clothes and this broken doll.
What the museum at Auschwitz does so well is to connect one with the lives of the individuals and the families who were dragged there to die. And it is these personal objects and the photographs that were taken by SS officers that take one into the heart of darkness.
The point of separation
As they entered Auschwitz-Birkenau, those who had been crammed into cattle trucks and dragged in trains, with neither food nor water, across Europe faced a point of separation from everything they knew and loved and valued. These are the words of Eli Wiesel:
The cherished objects we had bought with us this far were left behind in the train, and with them, at last, our illusions.
Every two yards or so an SS man held his tommy gun trained on us. Hand in hand we followed the crowd. An SS non-commissioned officer came to meet us, a truncheon in his hand. He gave the order: “Men to the left! Women to the right!”
Eight words, spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight short simple words. Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother. I had not had time to think, but already I felt the pressure of my father’s hand: we were alone. For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and my sisters moving away to the right … I saw them disappear into the distance; my mother was stroking my sister’s fair hair, as though to protect her, while I walked on with my father and other men. And I did not know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever. I went on walking. My father held onto my hand…
…Never shall I forget that night, the first in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night… Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreathes of smoke beneath a blue sky.
In some ways the most moving display is the one that we saw near the end of the visit. Some of those taken to Auschwitz were set aside to be worked to death. Like all the others they brought suitcases of their most cherished objects. Other prisoners were detailed to empty the suitcases and sort the belongings into piles of clothes and utensils and other things that could be sent to Germany to be used by others.
One courageous prisoner made it his business to save as many of the family photographs that he found in the suitcases as he could. After the liberation they were found buried in a suitcase. They are mounted on three walls of photos with as much information as could be discovered about the groups and families and individuals whose pictures they are.
They are just the kind of family and group photos, formal portraits and casual snaps, that you might have in a suitcase under your bed. To look these people in the eye and to contemplate what they suffered is emotionally wrenching.
At one point I found myself standing face-to-face with the Archbishop of Canterbury. We looked at each other and each raised an eyebrow. In that moment I knew that he was feeling what I was feeling,,,
Despair and hope
Eli Wiesel despaired and lost his faith in the camps. Others, like the much loved Rabbi Hugo Gryn and the psychotherapist Viktor Frankl (author of Man’s Search for Meaning) emerged from the camps with positive messages of redemption for humankind. I intend no criticism of Eli Wiesel. I have no idea what the experience of the camps would have done to my faith, and I do not have any right to say how others should have reacted to some of the most extreme conditions imaginable.
In the dark evening at the end an overcast and dim day, some 200 of us stood around the end of the railway line closest to where the crematoria had been. Some of the young people read the words of Holocaust survivors and short poems. And then the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi each in turn offered reflections and words of warning and hope.
The Archbishop reminded us that we have to make choices at every moment in our lives – and that one of the most challenging choices is to be fully human. This is our inescapable responsibility.
The Chief Rabbi reminded us that hate has not vanished from our world. That is why we must continue to remember so that we may be willing to fight for tolerance, respect and human decency, honouring the image of God that lives in every human being, however unlike us he or she is.
Still with us
The memory of what happened in the concentration camps and death camps of the Second World War is still live for many, whose families perished or whose children are marrying the descendants of Holocaust survivors.
A Bahá’í friend of Jewish descent wrote to me after I had posted about the upcoming visit:
It is the burial site of about 40 of my father’s relatives.
A Baha’i friend, whose family members also perished in Auschwitz, when she went, had a powerful image of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during that awful time, awaiting the souls in the Abha Kingdom, His arms spread wide to embrace them.
What did I take from the day?
Many tears, much grief, and a sense of commitment that my life and service as a Bahá’í should be dedicated to ensuring that such things are not going to be part of the future of humankind.
I am aware that this is an entirely inadequate account of an experience that can hardly be put into words. These are personal reflections and I would ask the forgiveness of any of my readers who feel that I have omitted matters of great importance. This post is already too long and there is much more to be said – but not now.
Holocaust Educational Trust
I want to pay a warm tribute to the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust, who organized this visit, one of many they organize throughout the year for Sixth Form students from different parts of the UK. Please visit their website to see what they do. I can only say that their planning is impeccable and that their work with young people is of the greatest importance.
Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Jew, Holocaust, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, Eli Wiesel, Hugo Gryn, Viktor Frankl, death camps, concentration camps, Poland, Germany, Nazi
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thank you so much for writing about your visit.
Thank you Barney for posting this….
I’ve been away quite a bit over the last couple of weeks and somehow missed this post. I think it’s one of your best ever. With its complete lack of sentimentality and melodrama, it conveys perfectly the, as you put it, “heart of darkness”. Thank you for writing it.
@Sholeh, @Bilo, @Tess Thanks for your kind comments. I very much appreciate them.
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