We are bumping along a winding, rutted road, in a mini coach. We are heading to Auschwitz, Poland, the concentration camp synonymous with WWII and the Holocaust. It is a beautiful dawn that lights up over the countryside outside of Krakow. The light is soft, diffused, the day full of promise. It is this beauty that contrasts so sharply with the horrors that would await us as we got off the bus at the concentration camps.
Auschwitz is the prototype for concentration camps set up by the Nazis across Europe. They experimented with methods, perfecting the process of their Final Solution here. For that reason Auschwitz, although not the largest of concentration camps - this is Birkenau, next door - is historically significant.
The exhibits are grisly, and gruesome and all too human - shoes, Jewish prayer shawls, discarded spectacles, suitcases. But the worst was the hair. The Russians found 7,000 kgs of it when they liberated Auschwitz; packed into sacks for shipment back to Germany, where the Nazi war machine used the hair of their Final Solution victims as raw materials in making army uniforms. 2,000 kgs of it are still on display in a dimly lit, shadowy room.
We are shown the punishment cells inside Block 11, or as the prisoners called it, "Block of Death" because if you were sent there the chances were not good. They worked 12 hours, walked in heavy, wooden clogs, was given threadbare, thin clothes to wear, had their hair shaven off and were punished; methodically, severely, sadistically. One form of punishment was being stripped and having to stand outside while buckets of water were thrown on them. In winter, most prisoners froze to death from this treatment. Already weak from work, undernourished and in suffering, they really had no chance.
There are many photos on display - most of them taken by the Nazis themselves. They tried to destroy all evidence of the concentration camps, but were foiled by the prisoners, who, when instructed to burn the photos, hide some negatives wherever they could. These were found later, after the war ended. A corridor in Block 11 show headshots of prisoners - men and women - gaunt, terrified, defiant, exhausted, young. The photos have date of incarceration in Auschwitz, then date of death. The longest ones I saw survived a year, though most of them perished within 6 months of entering the camp.
We also visited Birkenau, 20 times the size of Auschwitz and never completed. It was built as the ultimate engine in the Nazi's extermination plan. There were five gas chambers, none of which survive because they were destroyed by the Nazi's in their retreat, so as to destroy evidence of their war crimes. A railroad connects directly to Birkenau, to allow faster transportation of prisoners.
Once off the cattle loaders, these people - entire families of people - who'd been told that they were being "resettled" somewhere, who came with all their material goods and fearful hopes and optimisim, these people were separated by gender, and then customarily inspected by the camp doctor. The young, fit and healthy (mostly men), formed a line while the old, handicapped, women, and children formed another line. The first line entered the double barbed wire, electrified fences of Birkenau, to begin a dirty, cold, miserable imprisonment; sleeping 15 to a triple bunk bed while excrement dripped down level to level and there was no room to lie down, turn over or move; living in wooden pre-fabricated stables designed to hold 56 horses but holding, instead, 800 men; having to no water to wash; working hard labour 12 hours a day; sleeping on their shoes to avoid having them stolen; living in mud and mosquitoes.
The second line walked down the platform, along the carriages of cattle transports they'd just come off, carting their belongings. They were told that they would have a shower before joining their families again, then were brought to an underground "changing room" where they stripped, hung up their clothing, tied their shoes together neatly, before entering the gas chamber, disguised as a shower room, complete with fake shower heads in the ceilings. Still calm, still unexpecting and unsurprised, these people would be talking, wondering what their new life would be, glad to be off their cattle train.
The doors would lock, and the guards, above ground would drop Zyklon into the underground chamber, cover the lids and wait for silence.
The bodies would be stripped of valuables - jewellery, gold teeth, prosthetics, hair - which would then be recyled back into the immense German war machine. And then, all these people, these women and children and men too old or feeble to work - would be burned in the specially built incinerators next to the gas chambers. Their ashes would be dumped into the river running close by.
It was a horrifying, coldly logical process. Someone had sat down and thought this out in every detail, even issuing fake tickets to Greek Jews, who paid for the fare that would ultimately bring them to death. It was a very sober visit, but I'm glad we went because the Holocaust is such a significant part of modern history, not least because the rationale that led to it is still in evidence today. I want to understand why, though, and that, unfortunately is not an easy question to answer.
In the flat, cold light of a Polish winter day, the shadows from the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" or "Work Makes You Free" sign over the entrance to Auschwitz cast darkness on the dirt ground in front of us. Through these gates, under these arches millions of people - Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners and "enemies of the state" were marched through. The ones who survived the initial culling suffered unspeakable conditions, reduced to something less human by their captors. Most never left and those who did were changed beyond recognition.
The concentration camp of Auschwitz is a reminder of the horrors of World War II, of a world gone briefly mad, of the depths and darkness within each and everyone of us. It stands like a testimony and a mute warning against a repetition of the events of the past. I hope we learn from it. I hope we heal.