Auschwitz

Auschwitz. The word screams torments whenever I hear it or see it. Just as Treblinka, My Lai and Aberfan do and now there’s another, Aleppo. Can there be any among us for whom Auschwitz does not symbolize cruelty, depravity, horror, destruction and tortured death?

In 2013 I visited the Nazi concentration and extermination camps near Oswiecim. A short holiday in the beautiful city of Krakow impelled a visit. Oswiecim is a typical, modern and commercial central European town situated 44 miles west of Krakow. But a short walk away is a landscape tenaciously linked to man’s inhumanity to man. For here are Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the notorious death camps where 2.5 million people died at the hands of the Nazis as part of Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question. As Ota Kraus wrote, “Auschwitz was the scene of the greatest crime in the history of mankind”*.

After liberation in 1947 the two camps reappeared to the world as a museum and memorial site. 

There followed growing numbers of fascinated visitors, no doubt ghouls amongst them, but also writers and filmmakers who found a counter culture in which they could delve for artistic interpretation. Who has not watched with horrified fascination movies such as “Marathon Man”, “Schindler’s List”, “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” and “The Odessa File”? These films and many others are nerve-wracking to watch. Yet, for me, the novel “Sophie’s Choice” by William Styron published in 1979 is the most shocking and heart-rending account of the effects of the death camps in 1940s Poland.

So on my visit I was unprepared for the initial reaction on walking over that ground at Auschwitz II-Birkenau and the feeling on entering the preserved buildings at Auschwitz I. Horror at what Jews and other misfits in Hitler’s Europe suffered in the camps was not what I felt. Maybe too much exposure to TV documentaries and Hollywood’s take on the Holocaust over the years, plus still being in thrall to Styron’s depiction of Sophie Zawistowska’s ‘Choice’, has inured me to more recent accounts of Nazi horror. (By the way, you have to reach thirty pages before the end of the novel before you discover what the Choice was. It is a stunning book.)

No, it was not horror I felt; on this visit what coursed through me was overwhelming anger. Anger and frustration on behalf of firstly the 140 escapers from the camp and then all the soldiers and families left to sort through the aftermath. A few escapers took with them samples of a pesticide called Zyklon B. Here was proof of Nazi atrocity. Some, like Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, took their testimony (later known as The Vrba-Wetxler Report) to the Vatican, Downing Street and Washington in the summer of 1944. Yet, for various reasons little was done to stop the appalling treatment of European Jews. What horrified me was how the officers and staff at the camps got away with their crimes for so long. And still the exterminations went on into 1945. And still, seventy years after the Russians liberated the camps, for me the landscape of Auschwitz was too horrible to look at.

Does history repeat itself? I think sometimes it does. In 1944 politicians, generals and priests equipped with the knowledge of what was happening in Auschwitz did not act to stop it for numerous reasons. Overabundant credulity regarding German atrocities in the First World War resulted in sceptism during the second war. This played a part. Also secrecy was a big factor in the Nazis’ success in keeping the world ignorant of their genocide.

In 2016 no brutal regime in the world can hide their atrocities for long from press, social media and its own mobile citizens. Think of  Aleppo. Today’s politicians, generals and priests are failing to stop the atrocities in Syria.  This time, sceptism and secrecy cannot be blamed. This time Obama’s US has vacated the hot seat of global power. There is a vacancy for a diplomat whose force of personality will bring Putin, May, Assad and Hillary to talk, not bomb… and talk, and talk. Then, the landscapes and citizens of Syria and Iraq could be saved.

Krakow today

*For those interested in how the world reacted to Auschwitz then and afterwards, (rather than accounts of what life was like inside) the following books may be of interest.

 I Escaped from Auschwitz by Rudolf Vrba. Robson Books 2006                                                                      Auschwitz & After: Race, Culture & the Jewish Question in France. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. Routledge 1995                                                                                                                                          Sophie’s Choice. William Styron. Jonathan Cape. 1979. (1)                                                                                 A Theology of Auschwitz. Ulrich E. Simon. Gollancz. 1967                                                                                The Death Factory: document on Auschwitz.  Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka. Pergamon Press 1966.            Escape from Auschwitz. Andrey Pogozhev. Pen and Sword. 2007.                                                                  The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz. Denis Avey. Hodder & Stoughton. 2011.

(1)  Available in paperback at Blackwell's Bookshop  https://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk

If you would like to share your experiences of any of the landscapes discussed in this blog please record them in the Comments section.