2 min read
ByRosa Doherty, Rosa Doherty
Day two of my journey with the UK delegation involved a visit to both Auschwitz and Birkenau.
On Thursday 11,000 people from all over the world march the three kilometres between the two camps, designed to contrast with the death marches which took place towards the end of the war.
When the Nazis withdrew from the camps, inmates were forced to march hundreds of miles further west, while those who were too slow or fell were shot.
We made our way up the famous railway track into Birkenau, and Yoav, one of the educators, made an important announcement to the group.
He said: “Some have described the camps as the Disneyland of Holocaust history, because of how some people conduct themselves here.”
I’m taken aback by the peculiar image of a tour group, wielding selfie sticks and GoPros. As if the camps could possibly be similar to a spectator sport.
He says: “Some of them come here they are laughing joking talking as they walk around.
“I’m not interested in what they do, we don’t control that, but what we do is stay respectful.
“Be mindful of the ground you walk on, who we walk with and what that means.”
Walking with us Is Mala Tribich, 84-year-old survivor of a ghetto, cattle trucks, and imprisonment in two concentration camps.
I wonder how she feels to see people treat this experience as a Facebook opportunity.
But she says: “I suppose I understand, I think maybe some people come here confident they know it all and they think it is something to celebrate.
“It isn’t but I understand it.”
Her grace and humility took my breath away.
Her task was to accompany 30 students from across the UK gathered together by the Union of Jewish students.
And she and Yoav had clear goals in mind.
Yoav said: “This is not a passive trip where you can observe like a third party.
“I want you all to be active, when I ask a difficult moral question make yourself answer it, make yourself experience the moral complexities that played out here.
“It was not just perpetrator and victim there were grey areas and stories that happened here that will make you question your own humanity.
“And if we truly want to understand the Holocaust and how human beings created this, we must face those difficult questions head on.”
He was talking about the Sonderkommandos, Jewish prisoners forced to run the gas chambers that killed their own community members, even relatives.
And they did it knowing they themselves would live only 5 to 6 weeks before being killed.
Mala said: “Good people did bad things here the camps they brought out the best and the worst in people.”
What struck me first about Birkenau was its sheer scale and the precision in which it stood.
Barrack upon barrack laid out in clean lines, gas chambers built not randomly but strategically out of the way so people in the work camps would not see them.
The mass murder that took place was engineered with precision, Yoav said: “Science and technology can be used to progress man kind or destroy it.
“What you are looking at is the work of innovators in their field they were doctors and scientists, only they used their innovation to kill millions of Jews.”
The tour of Birkenau took more than four hours on foot to get around.
But the sense of who the prisoners were came in Auschwitz, where barracks dedicated to the belongings are immortalised.
Rooms filled with shoes representing the people who never walked again.
Pots and pans piled high as evidence that many sent to the camps believed they were going to be re housed, unaware of the reality that waited.