Lessons from Auschwitz Presentation

On Tuesday 27th April, Harriet Welch and Simone Matthews (Both Lower 6th), presented an account of their visit to Auschwitz in Poland, to staff and students. It was a very natural and moving performance. They have been kind enough to agree to the publishing of their script:

Introduction    
The Lessons from Auschwitz project represents a journey in more ways than one. On the literal level, Stage 2 of the course involved us visiting the camps themselves. But beyond that the entire 4-part LFA project was a journey of learning about not only the history of the Holocaust but also an exploration into pre-war Jewish life.
The latter was really the focus of the trip and justly so as so many times we seem to forget that those who died there had families, jobs and lives that were simply stolen from them. It is especially difficult as more often than not the Holocaust is described simply using statistics and figures rather than names and faces thus making it harder to encompass.
For example, it is estimated that 1.7 million people died in the Holocaust, but a statistic which I find much more moving is that to hold a minute’s silence for the death of every victim, we would need to remain silent for over three years
LFA takes you on the trip from a different angle, encouraging you not to focus on the masses but to try to relate back to a couple of individuals, encouraging you to see what really happened that the Nazis stripped them of not just their lives but their personalities, and those who did survive would never escape.

The Journey
The Journey that LFA propose is composed of 4 parts; a briefing seminar, that outlines the aims of the Holocaust Education Trust and the reasons why they feel the Holocaust is a subject that needs to have its social lessons heard, but it also gave us the opportunity to learn a little about pre-war Jewish life and voice our own reasons for participating and expectations of the trip.

When we speak about the Holocaust it is easy to lose sight of those individuals who were affected by these events, and this certainty holds true as our outlook on the Holocaust changed dramatically after we were honoured enough to hear a testimony from Kitty Hart-Moxon, those insight into the existence that she had in the camps shocked the audience, leaving all silent. During half term we travelled to Poland from East Midlands which is central focus of the project.
The follow up seminar was really our chance to talk about how the trip had affected us personally and whether or not our expectations had been met and it was safe to say that in most cases different emotions had been triggered as we all agreed that textbooks and photos cannot not compare. However the real issues are not in the teaching of the horrors of Auschwitz but the lack of emphasise on firstly accepting the events importance and then adapted our society around the lessons that it can teach us.

Arguably the main reason for the whole trip is step 4, the spreading and educating others as to the messages that society must start to learn from, or else risk repetition.

Our Journey
Events such as the Holocaust have been said to expose both the very best and very worst of humanity.
Our personal reasons for going on the trip were to appreciate and comprehend that all those who were involved in the Holocaust were human beings, with families and livelihoods before the atrocity at Auschwitz. There are so many social lessons that we can learn from this event and as a society the only way we can ever hope to prevent such genocide from happening again is to really change our mentally towards others who are different to ourselves, as the only crime that the millions murdered at Auschwitz alone committed was faith.

The town of Oswiecim was devastated by the Holocaust, as prior to war in1939 58% of the population were Jewish and now there isn’t even one. Of the several synagogues, including the Great Synagogue, only one remains as an . By visiting the Auschwitz Jewish Centre the emphasis for the visitor once more returns to life and humanity lost rather than the method of murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The focus of this part of the journey was to explore the way of life had by those before the war and to highlight that those who were treated worse than animals must be re humanised and respected.
We discussed issues such as how to distinguish between a perpetrator and a bystander and tried to understand the value of what was lost by seeing the site of the Great Synagogue and learning about Jewish life before the war. Above all, the objective of the LFA Project is to allow us to see the world as it was before and perceive the individuality of everyone.

Auschwitz 1
We then went to Auschwitz 1 where the wrought iron gates at the entrance to have been preserved and above them is the inscription ‘Abeit Macht Frei’ which means ‘Work makes free’. I think we all know that it certainly did not.
This is arguably the place most commonly associated with the catastrophic even and despite the buildings looking normal from the outside, one you step inside there is a real atmosphere and this is emphasised by the preservation of the rooms, with the addition of exhibitions, as they once were. Many of the buildings have been restored to create the idea of what it would have been like yet to be honest this was basically just plain, stone rooms with no heating comfort.

The most memorable building contained many of the Jews’ belongings and we walked around it in single file silently. For many people this is the moment is the one when it finally hit home because by looking at thousands of people’s prized possessions, knowing that they had packed believing they would be relocated, given a chance to start over, overwhelmed us all and silence fell over our group. It’s impossible to imagine and impossible to understand.
For Harriet the most upsetting thing was seeing a room full of suitcases with people’s names on them and for me it was walking around a nauseating room full the hair shaved of the innocent victims’ heads because you could see individual plaits and heads of hair.

This was another room – full of the shoes and the whole building was one of the only places where we were not allowed to take pictures.
One of the most important things for us was the idea that ‘hearing is not the same as seeing.’ Before our visit we had heard lots of different things about the eerie place and contrary to what we believed on the plane flying to Poland, nothing actually came close to seeing everything first hand.

This is the gas chamber and neither of us could spend long inside, knowing what had happened there.

Fittingly, next to this was the place where Commandant Hoss was hanged. It was right next to his house, facing the camp almost as if he had to answer for what he had done. Disturbing his wife was recorded saying that a benefit of living at Auschwitz was that she had first pick of the clothes of the prisoners.

Auschwitz-Birkenau
The last trip of our day was to Auschwitz-Birkenau and we looked at it from the watchmen’s tower, just as the Nazi’s would have done.

The most striking difference between here and Auschwitz 1 is the sheer vastness of it. There were no permanent buildings, only poorly constructed sheds. There were no reconstructed areas, only what remained of the original facilities. And most importantly there was just no life remaining there, only reminders of what brutal suffering had taken place. It has been said that even the bird song has been silenced.

Since returning we have often been questioned about the atmosphere and how we felt standing there in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and these are questions that are hard to answer as words cannot seem to explain just what goes through your mind on being there. The landscape itself is bleak and isolated as if too never recovered. It has been said that song birds have never been heard since and that certainly held true during over visit and the eeriness amplified the enormity of the camp.
The temperature when we were in Poland was roughly -14C yet even through our layers of clothing it was bitterly cold. This was one of the things we found hardest to comprehend because it is so shocking how people survived living in temperatures even lower than this in only a pair of cotton pyjama having had minimal food.

At the end of the trip we held a memorial service for those who had lost their lives at Auschwitz and for those who had survived. This was conducted by the Auschwitz Jewish Centres Rabbi and seemed to almost express the feelings that no one could find the right words for.

One of the most poignant moments of the trip for me was the walk back along the train tracks from Canada to what would have been most people’s first sight of Auschwitz.

Lessons
As we have already explained, the main focus for our trip was to explore both the historical and contemporary lessons that should be learnt and passed on to others. Simone and I believe that the two most important messages that you should take away with you today are the following; that simply sitting back and not standing up for what you believe in makes you as much to blame as the perpetrators themselves, as we should always endeavour to challenge acts of prejudice and discrimination in both our communities and society at large, even when this may be unpopular or inconvenient.
It is our duty to accept the mistakes of the past and learn from them do that future generations never have to be subjected to the possibility of it happening again.

It is only now that people are more willingly to talk about events and this should be encouraged and developed so that soon all can learn the lessons from Auschwitz.

W e must continue to remember those affected by the Holocaust especially when the remaining survivors pass way we will have no firsthand accounts left which is why the LFA Project and the Holocaust Education Trust overall is so important.
The Nazis’ ultimate aim was to dehumanize the Jews, hoping that if they were treated like animals, this was what they would eventually become. To see the life of every victim and to understand their individuality, therefore, is the only way to defy Nazi beliefs, returning their victims to what they were before the terrible events of the Holocaust and bettering humanity as a whole. To learn about such events, however harrowing, is essential for the world in future; it is only through the understanding of the past that we can prevent its repetition.

Testimony
Thank you very much for coming tonight and listening to our journey. We hope that we have encouraged you to visit Auschwitz yourselves and to pass on the important message on to other.
We would like to leave you with Elie Wiesel’s testimony. He was Romanian and was deported to Auschwitz, where his parents and sister were murdered. Since the war he has written numerous books reflecting on his experiences.

"The silence of Birkenau is a silence unlike any other. It contains the screams, the strangled prayers of thousands of human beings condemned to vanish into the darkness of nameless, endless ashes. Human silence at the core of inhumanity. Deadly silence at the core of death. Eternal silence under a moribund sky."