Year 12 Auschwitz Visit

It may be more than sixty years since the end of the Second World War but the impact of Auschwitz and the knowledge of what happened there is still incredibly powerful. I’d read books and poetry depicting people’s experiences of life in a concentration camp but nothing could quite have prepared me for the eerie chill of the place when I visited it recently with two Year 12 students, Vicky James and Kate Johnson, as part of a project organised by The Holocaust Educational Trust. We joined a party of over 200 sixth formers and teachers from across the region to share the experience of visiting Auschwitz – and to discuss how we must learn from such an atrocity and make our own societies more tolerant places.

We had met the other members of our party at a pre-visit seminar at Aston University on 11th March. Here, the students not only had chance to share their expectations and discuss various images and quotations, but also to listen to the inspirational Holocaust survivor, Kitty Hart-Moxon speak about her experiences in the Camp and how it affected her life afterwards.

On arriving in Krakow the following week for our day-long visit, it was cold and wet which set the mood for the grim scenes we were to see. Our first visit was to the Jewish cemetery in the town of Oswiecim where the gates are usually locked – not due to the threat of Anti-Semitic vandalism as we suggested but because there’s simply no-one left to visit the graves. The majority of the town’s Jewish community were either eradicated in the Holocaust or didn’t want to return at the end of the war.
From here we were taken to Auschwitz 1. We walked under the entrance gate bearing the sign, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ meaning ‘Work Will Make You Free’ and instantly the silence and austerity of the place hit us. We were taken on a tour of the barracks where the prisoners were kept and shown rooms full of items stripped from them: glasses, suitcases, domestic utensils, photographs, artificial limbs, human hair………. We were all visibly moved but glad of the group support and sense of togetherness. Our guide was incredibly knowledgeable and explained the horrors of what happened there with frankness and sensitivity.

Our final visit was to Birkenau, the overflow camp for Auschwitz. Here, the desolate landscape and endless ruins of huts and sheds where the mainly Jewish population were kept is both chilling and desperately sad. We stood as a group on the train platform which runs to the centre of the Camp and reflected that this was the very spot where over a million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners and other Nazi undesirables arrived shaken and confused. It was on this very spot that the flick of an SS officer’s hand meant they were either condemned to the gas chamber or sent to the labour camps. Our group readings of poetry and extracts from the novels of Primo Levi as we walked around the Camp helped us reflect and share our thoughts.

Our visit ended with a commemorative ceremony at the ruins of one of the gas chambers. Fittingly the rain had turned to hail and the wind blew fiercely across the Camp which brought home to us just how unforgiving the Polish winters must have been for the prisoners. Rabbi Barry Marcus from London, who accompanied our trip, read prayers in Hebrew and several students read their own reflections. We were all invited to join in with a reading of Psalm 23: The Lord is my Shepherd and leave our lit candles on the train tracks as we headed back towards the Birkenau gate. It was an incredibly moving end to a poignant day.

On 22nd March our whole group met again at Aston University to share our reflections and plan school and community follow-up projects. Kate and Vicky have lots of ideas for how they want to use their experiences to promote tolerance within and beyond the school community. There are plans for an assembly, a possible writing workshop for lower school pupils and a Year 12 debate afternoon in conjunction with Camp Hill Boys’ School.

Our visit to Auschwitz is a day that will stay with all three of us for the rest of our lives and we look forward to being able to channel our experience into constructive, challenging and creative opportunities for other members of the Camp Hill community.

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