On 1 November 2019, Lindsay Jacobs went on a day trip to Poland with two students from her school and about 200 other students from North London with the Holocaust Education Trust. Lindsay shares her reflections of the visit with us.
"Work Makes Free" reads the inscription above the gate - but this was a death camp, not a labour camp.
I knew about Auschwitz. I’d read books, seen films, listened to survivors’ testimonies, but nothing quite prepared me for what I would encounter there. I did not enjoy the visit but it was amazing. How can something be horrendous and amazing at the same time? It puts all of life into focus. No matter what hardships may come my way, my life will never be as tough as the 1.1 million men, women and children who were brutally murdered in Auschwitz, or the 6 million Jewish people who were executed during the war.
Pictures from around the Auschwitz sites. The cattle cart is a reconstruction. 80 people were crammed into them and they traveled for days with no food, water or sanitation. They were treated worse than animals. The fourth pictures shows a gas chamber.
I didn’t think it would affect me that much. That was until we entered a museum of clothing and belongings that were stolen from the Jews at Auschwitz. Thousands upon thousands of shoes piled high – and this was just a tiny fraction. A display of baby shoes made me picture my own baby in this situation. They murdered babies. There is a room full of human hair, shaved off of the women and children. The Nazis used the hair to make clothes. Many Jewish people cover their heads out of reverence to God, so this was yet another way to humiliate them.
Each pair of shoes represents a life lost.
We visited the reconstructed living quarters of those not immediately executed but forced into labour instead. The toilet blocks were just a series of holes – no privacy and no washing facilities. Worse than that, they were only allowed to use them twice a day and with many of them ill with stomach problems, one can only imagine the shame they suffered. The Nazis tried in every way to strip them of everything that made them human. As we walked around in our thick coats, scarves, hats and gloves, we could still feel our fingers going numb in the freezing conditions. How cold they must have felt in their thin, striped clothing. The life of those “spared” from execution was short and wretched.
Hard to imagine living in this squalor
Why visit such a place? I hoped to understand what drove the Nazis to such atrocities. I wanted to comprehend what the Jewish people, and other groups, went through. I came back with more questions than answers. Were the perpetrators and bystanders monsters? No, they were people like you and me. That scared me most of all. We are all sinners, capable of great evil. The legacy of Auschwitz has to be a warning to all of us. The holocaust didn’t happen overnight – it started with years of hatred and propaganda and people not standing up for what was right. Genocides continue to occur around the world because false beliefs about racial groups go unchallenged. May I be bold and willing to stand up against prejudice? May humanity truly be able to say: never again.
“Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.” James 4:17
Picture 1: Books with 4 million names of Jews who died. The names of the other 2 million are not known. Picture 2: Photos which people brought with them to Auschwitz. Most did not know they were coming to die - they thought they were being relocated.
