Auschwitz. An hour by road from beautiful Kraków, just outside the town of Oświęcim from which it gets its name. But its dark and potent reality nestled behind a double electrified fence now inhabits my thoughts. An unremitting ache of heart and mind, a reminder of something terrible, too terrible to contemplate without doing something. I have to write it down.
ARBEIT MACHT FREI (work makes you free) strung in iron across the entrance gateway cynically greets you as it greeted those who were brought here against their will. Soviet POWs and Poles, Roma people and Jews. As time progressed, mostly Jews from across Germany’s conquests, even Jersey. Lied to about resettlement in the east, they were brought here to work and to die. In the few buildings you can enter, their faces stare at you from almost life-sized photos: mothers and children, old people, youngsters, those in the prime of life. What were they thinking? Dehumanised by striped clothes and numbers tattooed on their forearms, even their meagre possessions (25kg each was allowed) were stolen, recycled and resold for the Reich. Behind glass, piles of suitcases with names scrawled on, spectacles, utensils, prosthetic limbs, combes and brushes, even Nivea cream. And shoes, thousands of shoes, here and there a smart red woman’s shoe or a child’s pair. And the showcase you are not allowed to photograph, piled high with human hair, tons of it, shorn from the heads of captives and sold on to fill mattresses.
In another building, mug shots of prisoners, meticulously taken of all new arrivals until the cost became prohibitive, recording date of deportation and date of death – most only lasted a few months due to the terrible conditions, the harsh treatment and the work. Some reached a faster end – for minor infringements or trying to escape – held in the dark, cramped, underground cells of building 11, then shot against the wall in the adjacent yard. Or hanged on a piece of rail set up like a goal post. The guide told us of some 900 who attempted to escape, mostly from work details outside of the camp, with 300 or so making it to freedom, mainly Poles who knew the area and the language. 
Others at Auschwitz I met their end in its gas chamber, a prototype to test this method of killing. It only remains because it was later converted into an air-raid shelter. The gassing took about fifteen minutes, achieved by dropping Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide, through holes in the ceiling, but the adjacent crematorium with its smart double-oven proved too slow. The technique was perfected on a truly industrial scale at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, just 3km away.
Auschwitz II-Birkenau is a desolate place. A single railway line runs through the archway of its front building, then splits into a number of sidings. The camp itself is huge, twenty-five times the size of Auschwitz I, and is where mass murder happened. Some crudely built brick huts still stand to the south, and to the north (where the Jews were imprisoned) a few wooden huts but most of the latter are gone (the wood used by the Polish to rebuild post-war Warsaw). What remains, stretching into the distance, are the outlines of where the huts stood and the remains of the huts’ chimneys. Those who were kept alive to work slept five or six to a shelf, cold and hungry.
We stood at the spot where, having disembarked from the train, prisoners were separated by an Nazi SS doctor into two lines: those deemed fit enough to work, and those who were not. The latter, about 75% of the arrivals, were taken straight to the gas chambers. Of course, they didn’t know that; the few guards stood casually, maintaining the fiction that these people were here to be resettled. So, what was going through their minds? Relief to be in the fresh air, out of the cattle trucks where they had been crowded together for up to ten days without proper food, water or sanitation? The hope of a hot meal, a chance to get clean, somewhere to lie down and sleep? Fear at what would happen to them and their loved ones? Surely, they didn’t foresee immediate death. The gas chambers are just rubble now, destroyed by the Nazis as the Russians approached, but you can still see the way down to the underground chamber where captives were told to undress and to remember where they left their clothes before entering the ‘showers’. Behind the remains of the adjacent crematorium is a pond where the bones, once they had been ground to dust, were dumped. Over a million were murdered.
‘It’s hard to think this happened’, I said to a couple from Liverpool. They agreed, like me quite stunned by the enormity of so many personal tragedies, of murder on such a vast scale. The heartlessness of it. The industrial zeal. How could people inflict such suffering on fellow human beings? For certain, the stain, the guilt would follow them for the rest of their lives. It is only possible surely, when someone accepts an ideology that defines another group as inferior, less than human, dangerous even, so that they can convince themselves that in this case,
cruelty is permissible, a duty even, and thereby fabricate a justification for their actions. Such convoluted thinking is not unique to the Nazis; there have been many genocides since: Cambodia (intellectuals were the ‘other’), Bosnia (Bosnian Moslems were the target of ‘ethnic cleansing’), Rwanda (the Tutsi minority were labelled ‘cockroaches’), Darfur (Dafuris targeted by the paramilitary Janjaweed), Myanmar (it’s the Rohingya who are different), and many more.
How far down the hierarchy does culpability for such crimes reach? A single gallows next to the gas chamber at Auschwitz I attests to justice meted out to Auschwitz’s first commandant, Rudolf Höss1. Whilst in charge, he lived with his wife and five children in a villa (still standing) not 100m from the gas chamber, and was a confidante of Himmler and Eichmann in finding the most efficient ways to implement Hitler’s Final Solution. After the war, he tried to hide as a gardener but was discovered, made to testify at Nuremburg, then handed over to the Polish authorities who tried him for murder, and returned him to Auschwitz where he was hanged.
Did anyone challenge what was happening? Certainly, those incarcerated demonstrated huge fortitude, and staying alive was one form of resistance – those who survived have used their personal testimonies to remind us of the extent of human evil. Escape attempts were another form of resistance. There was also a revolt by one of the Sonderkommando units (prisoners forced to staff the gas chambers) at Birkenau – they killed three guards and destroyed one of the gas chambers (which was never rebuilt) before being killed themselves. A priest (Maximilian Kolbe) took the death sentence of another and was canonised by Pope John Paul II in 1982. And there were surely countless acts of kindness and support between prisoners.
Were there guards who acted kindly? One German stands out as being moved by the predicament of those enslaved, Oskar Schindler, honoured in the film Schindler’s List (1993) starring Liam Neeson. Schindler came to Kraków as part of the German occupation, a military intelligence officer, industrialist and entrepreneur. By all accounts, a womaniser and a gambler too. But a man whose humanity got the better of him and who, single-handedly saved the lives of over 1,000 Jewish people and their families by employing them at his enamel (and later, armaments) factory in Kraków, and keeping them safe by bribing Nazi officials. You can visit the factory’s administration building (including Schindler’s office) and an exhibition explains the plight of Kraków under Nazi occupation; a quarter of its population were Jewish, at first labelled and derided, then walled into a ghetto. 
Later, they were deported to concentration camps including Auschwitz, and also Plaszów, a short tram ride from the factory. Some of Schindler’s workers’ families were imprisoned at Plaszów, now a greenfield site with posters telling of its past. Still standing is the grey house from where its commandant, Amon Göth (played chillingly by Ralph Fiennes in the film) cruelly took potshots at prisoners. 27th January 2020 is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. How can we use the horror of its history to guard against repeating such atrocities? Certainly, by preserving the memories of those who endured it. By retelling and commemorating; we must never forget. And by countering the holocaust deniers and the racists, the neo-Nazis and the anti-semites, and anyone who peddles hate and fear of those who are different. By recognising that as humans, we belong to the same family, created in God’s image and treasured by Him. Which means that human life is sacred and is always, always to be nurtured and protected.