32
www.kentonline.co.uk
Friday, March 29, 2013 Medway Messenger (MM)
To advertise: 01634 227800
MEDWAY STUDENTS AT AUSCHWITZ: SpECIAl rEporT
Pupils at the gate of camp Auschwitz I
FM2513536
Inside a gas chamber in Auschwitz I
FM2513798
The train tracks which took people to the gas chambers FM2513771
The mind cannot comprehend a normal life outside
A row of toilets. Right, A hut where up to 1,000 people would be kept FM2513797/2513790
The death wall where prisoners were shot
FM2513778
Suitcases which were confiscated from concentration camp prisoners FM2513777
Caelach McKeating, 17, from Rochester Grammar School, won a place after writing a letter saying why she wanted to go. When asked if it was what she expected, she said: “No. I didn’t know what to expect. I thought it’d be scarier from the outside, I don’t know, I just thought it would look really forboding just because you know what happened there so you build it up like some really scary thing in your head but Auschwitz I actually looked kind of normal. “It was just right in the middle of a place. I didn’t expect that. They said it was by a town but I thought it was going to be ‘Auschwitz here’, ‘town over here’. There were people waiting for a bus outside Auschwitz, how weird is that? “Most of the time I felt really bad because I couldn’t really feel anything, and then we went into the room with the babies’ clothes and that really got to me. Then it was right at the very end when we looked at the photos. A lot of them just look like photos we have at home of my family. “Because we go to a girls’ school we want to focus on survivor Susan Pollock and her story.”
IT’S a myth that the birds don’t sing at Auschwitz. As I stood in the freezing rain, one fluttered down from a tree onto the ruins of a gas chamber, for all the world as if it was another drainpipe and chirped happily. It would be so much easier to write the place off as an evil nether-world, where there is no life. The mind is unable to comprehend a place so horrific, desolate and vast, which takes half an hour to walk end to end. But it is real people who let about 1.3m human beings die within a few miles of where I stood. My one-day visit to the German Nazi concentration camps was organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust, which took 100 pairs of sixth-formers including those from eight Medway schools. Each pair, who also attended seminars with holocaust survivors, will report back on what they have learned to their peers. They were drawn from Rochester Math School, Chatham Grammar for Boys, MidKent College, Rainham School for Girls, Rochester Grammar, the Howard School, Robert Napier and Walderslade Girls. On the plane, the cheerful pupils made new friends and compared their 3am starts. Then came Auschwitz I, a converted barracks near the centre of an ordinary, thriving town in what was then occupied Poland. People passed under the infamous gates bearing the legend Arbeit macht frei (Work makes
Children from eight Medway schools have visited the site of the biggest mass murders in history. Reporter Dan Bloom went with them you free). It could be any other school trip. Suddenly, there was a room full of human hair. Not a lock of it but a mountain – black, straggly and tangled. I felt sick. I could smell it. Never have I been so thankful for a glass screen between myself and an exhibit. Then the shoes – thousands upon thousands of them. After that suitcases, toiletries, toys. There is a whole room dedicated to prosthetic legs. All were confiscated from prisoners. Most of them, 90% Jews, would not survive. They were starved, shot, killed by diseases and gassed. The basement of Block 11, a prison within the prison, is where the first, experimental killing with the cyanide-based Zyklon B gas took place in Sep-
tember 1941. Nearby lies a stack of empty canisters found by the Allies after the war. The experiment worked, and a gas chamber was built at Auschwitz I. Inside the orange electric lights glimmered over a simple, floral memorial while the pupils stood in silence. Through a single door in the same bunker lay the incinerators where they burned the bodies. What made the horror all the more affecting was how the camp looked almost genteel. The redbrick buildings could have been a British barracks. The camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss lived in a villa overlooking the gas chamber. He was hanged next to it after the war. The second Auschwitz camp was not genteel. Auschwitz II-Birkenau is a sprawling, purpose-built execution camp, whose gas chambers were blown up by the Nazis when they realised they would be caught. The ruins remain. Prisoners whose job it was to move the bodies buried their testimony on sheets of paper in the mud before they, too, were killed. From the top of the guardhouse you see train tracks, flanked all the way by row after row of leaky wooden huts which held up to 1,000 people each, stretching almost to the horizon where the gas chambers once stood. At first, the trains stopped halfway up and those who could work were separated from the weak, women and children, who were killed. Eventually, the trains
www.kentonline.co.uk
Newsdesk: 01634 227803
Friday, March 29, 2013 Medway Messenger (MM)
33
medway students at auschwitz: special report A bird perches on top of the ruins of a gas chamber which killed tens of thousands of people FM2517760
People queue up to walk into what was the gas chamber
Shoes of the dead
FM2513774
Alex Peters looks into a Jewish tomb Martin Winstone of the Holocaust Educational Katie Sears and Connor Clayton listen in nearby Oswiecim FM2513527 Trust speaks to pupils at a cemetery FM2513525 to the guide
place so horrific and desolate ‘Never have I been so thankful for a glass screen between myself and an exhibit’ simply pulled up next to the gas chambers. More than a million were killed from as far away as Paris, Oslo, Rome and the Channel Islands. Alongside Jews were homosexuals, Polish intellectuals, gypsies and prisoners of war. Seven thousand Jews once lived in Oswiecim, the next-door town. That is now the entire Jewish population of Poland The day ended in exhaustion with Rabbi Barry Marcus of London’s Central Synagogue, who pioneered the trips 15 years ago, giving a speech in the rain. We were frozen in our coats and hats, reminded how the prisoners had just striped pyjamas. He left us with the message that but for the grace of God, any of us could have been in Auschwitz. This touched me. My grandfather was Jewish and though I’ve never been to a synagogue, that would’ve been enough for the Nazis. The rabbi said: “Why were Jews murdered and gassed? Because they were different. But to someone of another culture, we are all different so an assault on difference is really an assault on all of humanity.”
FM2513799
the birds do sing
a waste of life
Joel Simons, 17, from Chatham Grammar School for Boys, was chosen because he studies history and religion at A-level. He said: “I was expecting quite a sombre, quiet atmosphere which it was, but contrary to being told the birds don’t sing there, the birds did sing there which sort of put the experience into perspective. “While the world has moved on, people still go back to remember, to learn lessons from it. “The children’s shoes and the human hair was moving, as was the ceremony at the end linking it to more contemporary issues like the genocides in Serbia, Rwanda, Darfur and Sri Lanka. “It’s very damning on human nature, but as the ceremony showed us, there is hope that through education we can change things. “In schools it’s very much powerpoints and perhaps a video with a bit of music set to it with a few distressing images, and you hear about six million people, but you don’t understand about the network and the perpetrators and how a vast array of people were involved.
Howard School student Isaac Naylor, 16, was picked for his outstanding work by the school’s head of history. He said: “I think for me it was a chance to go and see what I’d read about in the books. “Seeing the hall full of human hair, that was the one thing that made it much closer to home. It was taken from Auschwitz, put into factories and made into furniture. What an incredible waste of human life. “In the books they never really talk about the scale of the place. They talk about the trains coming in, the people getting off the trains and taken to be segregated but they never really say about the size. “I’d quite like to do a presentation to younger year groups to be able to tell them about my experience and hopefully for two or more of them to get the chance to go one day, and witness the living history that we’ve seen today. “Then hoping it’s a success with the younger year groups I could perhaps take the presentation out and invite the community leaders, local MPs, the press and local residents to come in and share our experiences with them.”
Rabbi Barry Marcus blows a ceremonial ram’s horn at the end of the trip to Auschwitz Picture: Blake Ezra Photography
A stack of used canisters of the death gas Zyklon B FM2513638
FM2513806