Lessons from Auschwitz

Lower Sixth students, Izzy Webster and Hannah Bloor, recently participated in the enlightening ‘Lessons from Auschwitz Project’, run by the Holocaust Educational Trust. They talk about their experience below.

The first part of the course was an orientation seminar where, in our groups, we spoke about pre-war Jewish life and prepared for the visit to Poland. We started by looking at Jewish life in different countries of Eastern Europe, discussing photographs of Jewish people and groups and our thoughts surrounding these. By doing this, we were able to acknowledge the idea that the Jews affected by the Holocaust were real people with real lives.

We listened to Holocaust survivor, Janine Webber, speak to us about her survival and the extreme difficulties she faced whilst living in Nazi-occupied Poland. Janine was eventually forced into a ghetto where she lost many members of her family to disease or deportation to Bełżec extermination camp. In order to survive, Janine faced a series of challenges during the years of Nazi occupation in Poland, being taken in by different people where the conditions were harsh. Janine is such an inspiration and her story was fascinating; one of the most interesting parts for me being just how many people were involved in keeping just one person alive. I also think it was important to learn that the Holocaust is not limited to Auschwitz or the concentration camps but more the atrocious conditions that Jews had to experience elsewhere and the unbelievable lengths they needed to go to in order to survive.

The next part of the project was the one-day trip to Poland. We first drove through the town of Oświęcim, a town more familiarly known to people with the Germanised name of Auschwitz, where the Auschwitz concentration and death camps were located. Here we spoke a lot about the local Jewish communities that lived there before the war. On arriving at Auschwitz we were greeted with the iconic “arbeit macht frei” sign meaning “work will set you free”, an awful irony in a place that so many came to be worked to death. In many ways I found Auschwitz quite misleading at first as it all seemed eerily quiet and contained within the buildings; making it was more difficult to comprehend the horrendous activities that occurred on this site.

We visited several barracks where we saw different items that were seized from the prisoners when they entered the camps. This included piles of human hair, glasses, suitcases and, perhaps the most memorable and striking, the corridor full with piles of shoes of all sizes belonging to men, women and children. It was horrifying to know that these belongings were brought with the prisoners as they had believed they would be starting a new life. In many ways the items represent the Nazis stripping the prisoners of their humanity by taking away the possessions personal to each individual. It helps us, from a modern day perspective, to translate the numbers which no-one can truly comprehend into real people.

We walked down a corridor of photographs featuring the prisoners and their ages and occupations, reminding us again that this atrocity happened to real people. Following this, we entered Block 27, an exhibit created on behalf of the Jewish people by the Government of Israel. This exhibit was truly moving. It features a space dedicated to the 1.5 million Jewish children that lost their lives during the Holocaust which includes a heart-breaking compilation of some authentic drawings sketched by Jewish children during the Holocaust. It also includes the unprecedented “Book of Names”, which contains the names of the millions of murdered Jews and blank pages for the names yet to be redeemed. We were advised here to take even just one name and remember it.

We visited Auschwitz-Birkenau just after, where we were able to witness another iconic image of the train track that connected so many European countries to Auschwitz in order to facilitate deportation. Visiting this site in particular made the Holocaust seem so much more real I think because it is the site you see so many pictures of but seeing it in real life is a completely different experience. We went inside a couple of the buildings where we were told stories from our guide about some of the people that had shared their experiences of living in such deplorable conditions. We had a tour of the camp, looking at different aspects such as a train carriage, the remains of the gas chambers and more personal items of the prisoners, such as keys which we understood as particularly heart-breaking as they represent the idea of the prisoners believing they were going home. In the evening we had a memorial service at the ruins of Crematoria II, Birkenau where we heard poems and a passionate speech from Rabbi Marcus who spoke about the necessity of remembering, it was truly thought-provoking.

One of the most important lessons we learned was that genocide is the result of actions and decisions beyond just those taken by the executioners. Every individual had a role to play whether they were a perpetrator or bystander and each decision made helped to contribute to the overall atrocity. The other most important lesson was that the victims of the Holocaust should be remembered as real people who had a life before the Nazis and they were no different to anyone else in society. The visit to the sites really helped to put this into perspective and allow us to at least try and comprehend the absolutely horrendous experiences that so many people were forced to experience. By learning from what we have seen we can hopefully ensure that the millions of people murdered will never be forgotten.