Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Human Story.
The Nazis reduced the Jewish people, like all their victims, to numbers. Numbers on their arms, numbers on their uniforms, and in their minds. Today, we are still reducing those victims to numbers. 6 million. Hollow statistics. Saturated by statistics, we remain blind to the humanity that was lost in the war.
People are constantly trying to deny the reality of the Holocaust because it’s easier, emotionally. Those who claim the holocaust didn’t happen are an extreme example, but those of us who think only of the numbers are another. It’s easier to ignore the fact that these numbers were individuals, not one singular mass called a death toll. Assigning all that pain to one number makes it seem as if there was only one victim, and this makes it all too easy to forget.
The Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) provided us with the opportunity to visit the sites of the genocide. Namely, Auschwitz-Birkenau: two camps, different and yet the same. Our journey began at our orientation seminar in Nottingham, where we heard the testimony of Zigi Shipper, a Holocaust survivor. His story was solemn, strangely offset against his optimistic message to stand against hate. Zigi came across as a happy man, not haunted by the horrors of his past. He has a family. He has a life. How could he have found the strength, all those years ago, to have survived? How could the perpetrators, all those years ago, have found the hate to make him try?
The HET encouraged us throughout to consider the human elements within the Holocaust. Every victim was an individual, but so was every perpetrator, and every bystander, and every collaborator. We cannot rationalise these people away as ‘monsters’ or ‘evil’. If we build a wall between us and them, we leave ourselves open to repeat the mistakes of the past. When we humanise the victims, as we should, we must humanise everyone involved.
Our visit to Poland started in Oświęcim. The town is better known by its germanised name: Auschwitz. We stood on the site of a former synagogue, once a hub of Jewish culture. It was burnt to the ground in 1939 as occupying forces moved to assert dominance and anti-Semitism in a town where 58% of the population were Jewish. Whilst we were guided around significant sites in the town, little could be seen of the once-prevalent Jewish community. Even the cemetery had been desecrated, the headstones torn from the ground and used in construction projects during the war. Attempts had been made to restore the graves, but it is impossible to place them where they had been before. All this shows the Nazis’ main aim — not just to destroy the Jewish people, but to erase them entirely. They saw a world where one day, no one would remember their Jewish neighbours, or friends, or colleagues, or indeed that they had ever been there at all. Today, there are no Jews living in the town at all. The last Jew to have lived there was Szymon Kluger, who opened the door of the synagogue in the Holocaust memorial museum in case anyone wanted to pray there. He died in 2000, and since then, no one has come to open those doors. Looking at the absence, the profound lack, of Jewish cultural influence that we knew had been there before… we had to ask, had they won? Had the Nazis succeeded in Oświęcim?
Arbeit Macht Frei. Those were the words that greeted us, on the black gate to Auschwitz I. We walked along the same rough-hewn paths that victims and perpetrators alike had walked. Everything was there, as it had been. Barbed wire pulled tight between concrete posts, encircling the red-brick prison blocks. The camp was originally intended to hold political prisoners, prisoners of war, Roma, Sinti and Jews, but of course, this list was expanded to include anyone the Nazis deemed unacceptable. Auschwitz-Birkenau was both a death camp and work camp, a combination present in only one other camp, Majdanek.
Throughout our visit, we saw the remains of the victims’ belongings. We saw their glasses, their keys, their utensils. We even saw their hair. The Nazis stripped their victims of their hair for various reasons. First, for humiliation, and to remove their sense of identity. Much of the treatment of the victims of the death camps was aimed at dehumanisation. Secondly, the hair was used commercially. Fabrics were made from the human hair of the victims, bought and sold and used as a commodity. Knowing this, one might have cause to wonder: did the perpetrators of these crimes need to believe that their victims were not human? Indeed, Hitler described the Jews as ‘untermensch’, meaning ‘sub-human’. We cannot describe the motivations or internal morals of the perpetrators all in the same way, as that would be a denial of the individuality of the perpetrators and the crimes themselves, but we can begin to explore the possible reasons why human perpetrators might have come to harm their human victims.
After seeing the cell blocks within the camp, our HET educator stopped us. Our attention was directed towards a house, very close to the barbed wire fences. This was the house of Rudolf Höss, the man who ran Auschwitz. He had a family, like Zigi has now. What makes them any different? Why was one given the power to hurt the other? Why did he embrace that power?
The gas chamber in Auschwitz I was an empty space. Similar to a cellar, dilapidated. It’s hard to ground yourself in that reality, that this is where they had stood. The crematoria adjoined directly to the chamber. The furnaces were still there, quiet.
Our next stop was Birkenau. For many, it has been the final stop.
“here in this carload
I am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him I”
- Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car, by Dan Pagis
Dan Pagis was imprisoned as a child in a concentration camp in Ukraine. He is a Holocaust survivor. This poem is one of many inspired by the Holocaust, and this one is especially poignant. The railway lines run directly under the watch tower of Birkenau and today, a cattle car sits inside the camp on the tracks. It is a memorial. Again, we see people being dehumanised. Again, we see the chain of suffering.
Where do you start when talking about Birkenau? At the gate, which is the most iconic image of the camp? At the sheer vastness? At the ruins of the crematoria? Maybe we should look long and hard at the fact that in the summer of 1944, there existed an unfinished extension to the camp. It was not even close to being over when it was stopped — if, indeed, it stopped at all. This genocide was not restricted to the camps. It spilled over across the war, across Europe and beyond. It is not a singular, neat event.
To illustrate that point, we have the Sonderkommando. In these people, we have an intersection between victims and perpetrators. These were prisoners who were forced to work inside the crematoria. At most, they were allowed to live for a few months at a time in their job roles. During this time, they would prepare unsuspecting victims for their “showers” upon arrival. Afterwards, they burned their bodies. Other jobs involved heavy manual labour, such as ditch-digging to drain the swampy fields on which the camp was built. Being told to work at Birkenau was not equivalent to mercy. It was merely a delayed death sentence.
Our experience at Birkenau had a sense of isolation, even though we walked as a group. Such a vast expanse of open space that had somehow been filled with people, now silent. There was always a long stretch of dirt between us and the next tour group, the next stable block, the next fence.
By the end of our journey through the death camps, sunset was closing in. We were each given a memorial candle which we held, unlit, in the shadow of the great memorial monolith near the back of Birkenau. There, we heard Holocaust poetry, and the words of Rabbi Marcus, who joined us in the camp to lead a memorial service. He was too young to have experienced the camps himself, but his grief for the victims was tangible. His powerful message echoed loudly across the vast open silhouette of Birkenau, now in total darkness and stillness. Amongst his words, one phrase stood out above the others:
“History is a race between education and catastrophe.”
This truth has been written in blood, time and again throughout the story of humanity. Here, we had been looking at the Holocaust — literally meaning ‘consumed by fire’ — but this is not where genocide starts and ends. Nor, indeed, are the Jewish people the only race to have ever been targeted. Most of us would claim to know that ignorance breeds fear — but how many of us would realise what fear can lead to, before it’s too late? Early intervention seems to be the only way.
Any one of us might be a victim, if catastrophe wins the race. Do you think that the Jewish community saw themselves as a minority group, when cities in Poland were often one-third Jewish? When their communities had been established there for up to 1,000 years before 1939? They were no less integrated in their societies than any other group. They were no less integrated than we can claim to be.
We lit our memorial candles and laid them, side by side, on the ground, and began the walk along the railway tracks. The air was biting cold, though it would never be comparable to night here, deep in a war-torn winter. We passed under the watchtower again, breaking away from the tracks as they curved away, towards Auschwitz I in the distance. We looked over our shoulders, and the camp stared back.
Co-written by Hope Sidebottom and Erin McGookin
