Cardiff Times February 2020

Page 18

“through the valley of the shadow of death” By Wyn Evans This article first appeared in Cardiff Times in 2015 and is reprinted as a mark of respect on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. “Between August 1939 and September 1941, over 70,000 mentally and physically disabled inmates of sanatoria and asylums in Germany and Austria were murdered after doctors certified them as ‘life unworthy of life’. The victims were transported to one of six clinics equipped with gas chambers where they were poisoned with carbon monoxide gas piped through false shower heads in mock bathrooms.1” The programme was suspended once relatives and others protested and “instead, the personnel, expertise and technology of mass murder were transferred to the killing of Jews* The commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp experimented with lethal Zyklon-B (cyanide) gas 2”. The Girl, my daughter, has Down Syndrome and would have been included in the Nazis’ medicalised murder of the disabled under this ‘T4’ compulsory euthanasia programme.

side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgement”. The Auschwitz complex was vast, including 48 sub-camps, and was the largest of the Nazi camps. Auschwitz I was a concentration camp used for political prisoners, prisoners of war, Roma, Sinti and Jews. It held around 15,000 inmates and had its own prison (Block 11), gas chamber and crematorium. It was here that Zyklon B was first used to kill significant numbers of people (600 Russian PoWs and 250 sick prisoners). Auschwitz II at Birkenau developed to become the main extermination centre and a slave labour camp, eventually expanded to hold up to 200,000 prisoners. Old farmhouses were used as gas chambers until four crematoria and gas chambers were established.

On 11th February this year I visited the AuschwitzBirkenau concentration and death-camps on behalf of the Cardiff Times, at the invitation of the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET)’s Learning from Auschwitz (LFA) Project, along with two hundred or so 17-18 year old students from across Wales. Here, I want to address how it felt being at Auschwitz-Birkenau, drawing also on the reflections of those who survived the camps. But I hadn’t expected such a clear link between that dark past and The Girl’s present.

Entering Auschwitz I we walked beneath the sick joke inscribed above the gates: ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, Work Makes You Free, where the process of destruction gained momentum. “For the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man*; we had reached the bottom* Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so*so that something of us, of us as we were, still remains” (Levi).

Let me begin at the end. I got home around midnight of what had been a long day’s travelling. The Boss welcomed me home with a hug and asked what it had been like. Then the tears came. All I could find the words to say was “vile vile vile”. I imagine that this would be the reaction of any thinking person of reasonable imagination and normal levels of empathy. At this place over 1.2 million people were robbed, degraded, and tortured, broken, gassed, and cremated. Primo Levi 3 writes that even “dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction”. A Polish woman was our official guide to the camp. Gently -spoken, she had been in the job eighteen years. I noticed that she never once referred to ‘the Nazis’ only to ‘the Germans’. She told me of the large number of Poles put to death at this camp. “The Germans regarded us as untermenschen, sub-humans, who would be culled and those left put to work as slave labour”. Levi, again, noted that “to destroy a man is difficult*but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our

Article - Wyn Evans - February 202... page 1

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We saw the piles of shoes, of hair (literally tons of it – think of the numbers murdered, that hair could be weighed in tons), of artificial limbs, personal and household objects stripped from the prisoners. For a father of a little girl, these were of course upsetting. But what left the largest scar on my psyche was Block 11. Here were the mock-trial rooms (nobody was found not guilty). Outside was the Death Wall, where prisoners were shot often after being taunted with ‘jammed’ guns. Next to this wall of death were torture posts where people’s hands were tied behind them before being hauled up to hang from the wrists. Inside were cells where people were starved to death; or gassed; or crammed together four to a bricked space no bigger than a phone box all night long - if suffocation didn’t kill them then the full shift of work they were made to endure each subsequent day probably would. I still cannot assimilate that in the middle of a death machine, the Nazis needed to find ways to make prisoners’ lives even more unbearable.

Monday, 27 January 2020 14:45 Magenta Yellow Cyan Black


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