It is cold, very cold and the show is lying heavily beside
the roads, on the rooftops and on the pavements. Krakow in Poland is a beautiful city and in
the throes of a cold winter when the clear blue skies allow the sun to glisten
on the long icicles that hang from the rooftops there is tremendous magic in
the place.
Today, however, is a grey, misty day with no sign of fresh
snow. The fog seems to simultaneously
rise from the ice and snow and drift down from the sullen sky. Today is the day we are visiting Auschwitz,
the concentration death camp operated by the Nazis in the Second World
War. We climb into the bus and are
driven through the snow blanketed countryside.
The few people that we see as we move swiftly along the road are bent
against the cruel wind and wrapped up in layers of clothing to keep them
warm. It is a day for reflection; to
observe, listen and then to feel.
The car park is filling up as we arrive and we pull up beside
another bus; this one is disgorging a crowd of students from another part of
Europe – they are in high spirits as they wait to be organised. We enter the visitor area and buy tickets. Not for us the guided tour, we want to be
apart from the crowds, to have some space to feel what happened there.
The cold is biting, clinging to our faces, dragging at our
feet. It is a welcome relief to go
inside to view the exhibition of shoes, of human hair and to read the stories
of those that were killed, see the photos of the imprisoned and their guardians. Steadily the horror seeps into the
brain: here is the place people were put
up against the wall and shot; there are
the gas chambers; these are the furnaces where living children met their end; these are the workers dormitories, cold
wooden and concrete; this the end of the railway line, where life finished
before death came.
Walking out in the snow they can be seen, shuffling along,
leaving no mark. In the icy air their breathing
creates the mist that clings. My body is
cold, uncomfortable, in the silence that still holds the ghosts of the
dead. It is warmer in the gas chambers
and where the furnaces once reduced so much flesh and bone to ash. A new horror emerges as I read about the cold
efficiency of the factory of death and my mind slips unbidden from the shock of
the killing to the lives of the killers – I become aware that I have more in
common with them than the ragged skeletons.
Like many of these men who stare out from their photographs I am
well-educated, privileged, with my roots in the dominant professional
middle-class. And it begins to dawn on
me that I have within me the capability of cruelty, the level of fear and the
lack of compassion to be part of such an institution of torture, destruction
and death. All I need is to be convinced
of the rightness of the cause and to separate myself from the existence of
other living beings. I have done it; I could
do it now – for I have learnt well, though I cannot remember the lessons.
We return to the car park at the same time as the students;
they are returning to their bus in small groups, bowed by the cold and what
they have seen and heard concerning the capabilities of the human race. I sit with my wife and eldest son; I cannot
speak as I look back and remember within the walls such echoes of violence,
courage, desperation, misery, arrogance and sheer horror.
I ask the question: what is the road we can take that means
that we are compassionate rather than cruel; even to the point of facing death
rather than destroying another?
