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'A week I'll never forget'
WEDNESDAY of last week was a day I'll never forget. I went on a day trip, with Henry and Anna from the Weald School at Billingshurst, to Auschwitz.
The Holocaust Educational Trust aims to take two sixth form students from as many schools as possible to show them what happened, within living memory, in a country so close in every way to our own.
We all think we know about the Holocaust.
I can tell you that this visit makes you understand it in a completely different way.
We start in Auschwitz I, a pre-war Polish Army barracks on the edge of the town. This became a labour camp, for prisoners of war and Polish political prisoners.
Here the Nazis trialled the use of Zyklon B as the means of murder on an industrial scale.
Here is the iconic gate, with the legend 'Arbeit Macht Frei' – work sets you free. Yet for most prisoners the only escape was through death.
Here we visit the museum – with the huge collections of clothes, of personal possessions, of luggage, with the names of their former owners still visible.
Most distressing of all, the mountainous piles of human hair shaved from the heads of mass murder victims, next to fabric and carpet woven in German factories from earlier shipments of hair.
Then two miles away to Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, built a safe distance from the town by prisoners.
The scale is stunning. There are no fewer than 300 buildings here.
We enter through the infamous gatehouse, through the arch with the rail tracks still in place that brought a million people to their deaths.
We see a typical wooden shed where 200 men shivered their way through a bitter winter before malnutrition or disease or sheer weakness carried them off.
We walk over the platform where trainload after trainload of Jewish families left the cattle trucks in which they'd journeyed from as far away as Greece to be selected for work or for instant murder.
Then a half mile walk to the ghastly ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria.
The family photos taken from the belongings of those who made this last journey. And finally a ceremony at the monument at the ruins, where Rabbi Marcus sings a Hebrew lament for the holocaust dead.
On a bitter February evening, with the snow swirling round, in the darkness under the light of a single sodium light, the plangent notes sounding in the bleak birch wood – this was an unforgettable reminder of the bad, bad place to which hatred and prejudice unchecked can take us.
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Weather for Horsham
Thursday 24 May 2012
Today
Thunderstorm
Temperature: 14 C to 26 C
Wind Speed: 9 mph
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Sunny
Temperature: 12 C to 23 C
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