Today I visited Auschwitz Concentration camp. I have visited this site before in 1998 while I was studying in Poland. I felt the same sorrow and heavy heart I did at my first visit but have come away with an increased sense of responsibility to never allow these atrocities to ever happen again.
A concentration camp isn’t exactly someplace you think of going on holiday but it is important to visit to truly understand the magnitude of what happened here.
It’s a bit surreal as you walk through those infamous gates on a cloudless summer day. It is peaceful and the surrounding rural areas idyllic. Our guide on the tour was great. Stern in her manner but you don’t exactly want someone cracking jokes do you? She gave me insights into the history of the place I’d either forgotten or never learned. I’m not going to go into it here, unless you’re a complete moron you would have heard of the holocuast.
The camp is a place of solemn reflection. It is an emotional experience. There two times where I welled up and nearly lost it. One was the photos of the women carrying infants and holding the hands of their young children (my nephew’s ages) going into the gas chamber. Knowing that photograph was taken only minutes before they perished was heartbreaking. The next emotional experience was seeing the room full of human hair. There was literally mountains of it, all of it shorn from the heads of the recently gassed. It gave some small indication of the scale of this massacre. Truly moving.
We all have this idea that the gas chambers had actual gas pumped into them. That is not true. The cyclon b gas was actually thrown into the chambers full of people and it was their body heat that activated it. Death came within 5 minutes. Such tiny innocuous colourful pellets responsible for the death of millions.
You would think that the place would feel or smell evil. It doesn’t. It doesn’t feel haunted, after all if you were a ghost you wouldn’t hang around in the place where you suffered most.
The peace of the place strikes me the most, with peace comes forgetfulness and we must never forget.
I have come to this place knowing what to expect but was still profoundly affected by it again.
Cyclon B – this was the gas used to murder countless people at Concentration Camps all over Europe
May the souls of those who perished here find peace.
September 17, 2014
Very moving account Jelly. Stopped to read on my way to work. We are lucky to live in this country