10 November 2023 and with my anxiety peaking, I continued through the streets of Kazimierz (Krakow’s Jewish Quarter) to the designated pick-up point.
Today, I was going to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time.
Having spoken to Jewish friends and colleagues prior to my trip to Poland, I was anticipating a day of reflection, tears and shock.
Boarding the coach amongst a group of strangers, I began bracing myself for an intense experience.
Auschwitz: where people become numbers
Around an hour and a half later, we arrived in Oswiecim – the Polish name for the town where the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex was developed.
Passing security, I stood with the other English speakers and was introduced to a local tour guide who would join us for the first half of the visit: Auschwitz I – the former work camp.
Built upon old army barracks, here Jewish, Roma, Polish and other individuals were worked to death, subjected to medical experiments and in some cases, gassed to death.
As we started the tour, we entered through a tunnel to the sound of the names of the victims – a poignant moment of reflection. This is what I’d anticipated.
However, one and a half hours later, I was left angry, frustrated and disappointed. Not (solely) with the injustice of the Shoah, but at the utter insensitivity of the tour guide at the world’s most poignant genocide memorial.
The guide’s tour was impersonal, insensitive and incomplete.
Speaking at the speed of light with a dead-pan voice, we were rushed from building to building.
Struggling to keep up with the speed, whilst critically reflecting and taking photos and met in a basement of crowds of people, I was then separated from my group.
Following judgmental glare after glare from another tour guide, I was lost.
When I finally found the group around 20 minutes later, I was left to enter the gas chamber alone. No history, no context, nothing.
Met with indignance and blame by the tour guide, I later shared my experience with the trip leader.
The complete lack of sensitivity shown by a man who is tasked to guide visitors around one of the most haunting sites of history.
Aware of time constraints, I expected merely time for reflection and an engaged guide from whom we could learn and reflect.
However, with the speed and content of the tour, we learnt nothing of the people behind the numbers – their lives, their feelings, their histories. They were merely arrivals, prisoners or deceased…
Where was the humanity? The reflection? The remembrance? The shame?
We heard very little about people affected. Very little about their feelings, their histories and their pain.
The Jewish and Roma and Sinti communities were mentioned by name, but with very little detail.
Number, after number, we walked around bricks and mortar, only occasionally met by photos of people affected.
We reflected upon the painful images of Hungarian Jewish families arriving at the camp.
Contrastingly, we also saw the portraits of prisoners – with the same clothing and shaved head – images that showed how prisoners had been denied their individual personalities, histories and freedoms. They had become numbers.
Expressing my concern to the trip leader, I explained how I could understand a certain desensitisation when working day-in-day-out in such an environment but that I was left questioning:
What is the aim of a memorial if not to promote respect for the deceased, reflection on how humanity sank so low and to invite action to stop it from happening again (although we all know it did)?
Inviting reflection: visiting Birkenau
For the second part of the day, I joined an Italian group for the visit to Birkenau: the former death camp.
The remaining site consists of a mixture of rubble from where the Nazis attempted to conceal the truth of the gas chambers, the original cold, dark, shabby “huts” where women were left to sleep, and a multilingual memorial to pay tribute to those who were murdered.
As a British-born woman, brought up in a monolingual household, Italian was not my first language. I am half-Italian but learnt Italian as a foreign language as a teenager.
However, I can honestly say I understood and took away far more from that half of the trip then the first.
Our guide was personable, honest and kind. She shared stories of families, feelings and experiences as she taught the horrors of the camp.
One particularly poignant moment was when she recalled how one Italian mother shed a tear as she silently hugged her son goodbye, knowing they’d never see each other again.
Arriving on tracks purposefully built to enable the Nazis to bring as many people as possible directly to the camp (out of sight from the public), she shared how the conditions in the barracks were so bad that rats would feed upon deceased prisoners.
She explained how the graffiti we’d seen on the walls of these huts was made by modern visitors not prisoners – as they’d dare not write anything for fear of being accused of conspiracy.
This beautiful lady also allowed time for questions (including catch-up questions from me), for pause, for feeling.
She gave us the space for introspection, reflection and respect to those so brutally killed at this hell hole.
Pausing to end the tour, she concluded with a clear message:
We should visit this site to understand. For we’ll hopefully never suffer so tragically as those who died in the Shoah. We therefore won’t fully understand.
But, we must learn and we must stand against hate – for the future.
And that’s the message we needed to hear.
Going to Auschwitz-Birkenau shouldn’t be about “dark tourism”. About checking a box, seeing bricks and mortar and crumbled remains, or about learning numbers without knowing the lives, fears and hopes of the people behind them.
It’s the people that matter.
And that’s why visiting any camp (as part of wider Holocaust education), should be about remembrance of those so brutally murdered, reflection on how this was enforced on them and about committing to action to ensure it never happens to anyone every again.
The Holocaust didn’t happen in a day.
It was the culmination of centuries of antisemitism, amid a fascist regime and economic collapse. The accumulation of “othering”, demonising and scapegoating.
And so, it’s a very sad day indeed that when visiting a memorial, I was also told that there was “no time” to light a candle, to lay a memorial stone, to read a poem or to recite a prayer so lovingly shared with me by a Jewish friend and colleague. To show my respect, to mourn and to remember these people in this very personal way.
With no time at Birkenau, I was however able to spend my final day in Krakow making up for this.
And so, I’d like to finish with said poem, recited in front of the remainder of the ghetto wall in Krakow the very next day. And where, lies a plaque that reads:
“Here they lived, suffered and perished at the hands of Hitler’s executioners. From here they began their final journey to the death camps.”
We remember you. We honour you.
May your memory be a blessing.
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find on returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
… Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.(Excerpt from “If This Is a Man” by Primo Levi, translated by Stuart Woolf)
Acknowledgements:
Firstly, like to thank CEJI for enabling me to travel to Poland as part of their “Train the Trainer” programme in combatting antisemitism.
Thanks also go to FESTIVALT for hosting us in Krakow and for helping to organise my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Secondly, I’d also like to thank my dear friend Doreen for her support and for sharing the beautiful (coincidentally Italian!) Primo Levi poem with me.
Lastly, to read and share personal life stories of survivors from the Holocaust and subsequent genocides, click here.
Images: Elizabeth Arif-Fear © (Flickr: Jewish Krakow, Auschwitz-Birkenau).
This post was originally published on Voice of Salam.