Auschwitz Visit
Ellie Birnie and Ellie de la Bedoyere (U6) travelled to Poland at the beginning of November as part of the “Lessons from Auschwitz” project. Read their report. The girls will be leading activities in January for the whole school community to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
We arrived in the City of Krakow with 200 fellow students from the South East region. We first visited the town surrounding the camp which had once been a thriving Jewish community, yet not a single Jewish person populates the area today. Here we visited the town’s last remaining synagogue and attended a service taken by a Rabbi who accompanied us. From here we travelled to Auschwitz, walking under the iron words “ Arbeit macht frei” which had greeted millions of Jewish people before us. Auschwitz is composed of two camps Auschwitz 1 was primarily a labour camp and Auschwitz 2 was a death camp. This first camp has been partially transformed, the barracks now containing exhibitions with collections of shoes, gas canisters, suitcases and human hair. Seeing each exhibit, for us, reversed the dehumanisation that the Nazi’s had tried to institute on the Jewish race, reminding us that each victim was an individual with a story, not just a statistic.
We then moved on to the second camp, Auschwitz 2. There was a stark contrast between the two camps, in both physical appearance and purpose. Looking over the camp from the watch tower we could see the true scale of Auschwitz 2 which stretched out for miles, surrounded by its original barbed wire fence. Below the watch tower ran the railway tracks used to transport millions of Jews in cattle trucks.
The stables in which the inmates slept were dark, cramped and cold. Shivering in our three layers of warm insulated clothing it was hard to imagine what it would have felt like, in thin striped uniforms. The final place we visited within the camp were the gas chambers. The chamber we entered remains in its original state, from the openings in the ceiling where the Zyklon B gas crystals were released to a scratching of the Star of David on the wall. Originally there had been three gas chambers at Auschwitz 2. However, one was blown up by an uprising of Jewish inmates during the war, and the second was destroyed by the Nazis during the liberation, in an attempt to cover the evidence of their crimes.
The day ended with an emotional service led by a Rabbi; we stood in the darkness amongst the rubble of what was once a gas chamber and listened as poems and passages were read; to mark the end of the service we each lit a candle and placed thse along the railway track which had transported so many innocent people to their deaths.
We found the entire experience deeply moving and immensely interesting and would recommend a visit to Auschwitz to anyone who is given the chance.
