As fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors remain, the story of Auschwitz will soon be in the hands of the next generation. Carly Read reports.
Since returning from Oświęcim I have a ghost. He’s in my kitchen while I cook, he’s in my bathroom while I wash and he stands over me while I sleep.
I do not know his name, but his presence haunts me as a reminder of my visit to Auschwitz where hundreds of thousands of Jews were victims of incomprehensible mass genocide during the Second World War.
Upon arrival at Krakow on Wednesday with the Holocaust Educational Trust and some 200 students from south-east England schools, Poland’s unusual warmth that day was replaced by an atmospheric black cloud that I had imagined plagued Auschwitz’s eerie death camps all year round.
As we walked under the infamous concentration camp sign – Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Sets You Free) – accompanied by our tour guide Witold Lysek, the world as we knew it shut down for the remainder of the day.
Auschwitz I was primarily a concentration camp holding between 15,000 and 20,000 prisoners at a time and many of the barracks now house public exhibitions consisting of maps, photographs and, of course, the horrifying statistics.
Rooms are dedicated to the possessions of those murdered – mountains of spectacles, piles of shoes and two tons of hair from the shaved heads of female prisoners.
A corridor has been transformed into a gallery of mug shots of the dead – men, women and children with confused and terrified expressions of their faces.
By the time we reached Birkenau, referred to as the extermination camp and the largest camp within Auschwitz in 1944 holding 90,000 prisoners at any one time, I was numb.
Stables designed to hold up to 60 horses were used to house captives living in atrocious conditions and for those able to survive starvation, exhaustion and disease, the fate that awaited them was the gas chambers.
As we entered one of the chambers my chest felt trapped in a vice. The air was thick and scratches occupied the stained walls. Two girls rushed to the exit coughing and struggling for breath.
Our final stop was a building dedicated to photographs of those killed – family outings, weddings and births covered the walls. One photograph showed a teenage girl doing a handstand, her dress caught over her face with her brother holding her feet and laughing.
During a candle-lit vigil, a teary-eyed and defiant Rabbi Barry Marcus of the London Central Synagogue said: “If we were to hold a minute’s silence for every victim of the Holocaust we would be stood here for nearly three years.”
As we followed the notorious train track towards the exit we hoped the candles we gently placed at the end of the line would light the journey home for an estimated 1.3 million Jews killed in history’s biggest systematic and barbaric massacre.
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