VISITING AUSCHWITZ

Everyone has heard of Auschwitz and the terrible horror stories about this particular Second World War Concentration Camp. How would you feel if you went there?

Well, thirty year ten students from Cowplain Community School did just that in July 2001. It was part of a school-organised tour of Berlin, Krakow and Prague; I was one of those students. As fifteen year-olds we did not know exactly what we were letting ourselves in for. It turned out to be a roller coaster ride with emotional ups and downs.

The coach left Cowplain at 1800 hours on the 16th July and everyone, including the four teachers who joined us, were very excited. However as you can imagine, after around twenty two hours spent in a coach the excitement soon wore off and tempers began to wear thin. Once settled in a youth hostel in Berlin we were then expected to spend an hour and a half on a walking tour of the city. After only sleeping on and off for around four to five hours most of us were not happy with this suggestion. The tour was quite interesting though, some of the sites seen included an air-balloon marking Hitler's bunker where he killed himself, parts of the Berlin wall, a Gestapo base and Check Point Charlie.

On the third day we again sat on a coach taking us to Krakow, in Poland. By the time we arrived we were very exhausted due to the noisy night in the youth hostel, and trying to sleep on the coach was impossible. We now found that we had to prepare ourselves for the traumatic day ahead; no one really knew what to expect. Some of us had heard stories of it being like a barren wasteland without anything growing there and no birds flying overhead. This was not quite true.

It was an hour's drive from our hotel to Auschwitz and everyone was becoming more and more nervous as the minutes ticked slowly by. My stomach was tying itself into so many different kinds of knot I thought it was turning into a Tall Ship. As the coach pulled into the car park we saw why the stories we had been told were not true. There were a lot of mature trees outside and from what we could see of inside the camp itself, the buildings looked as if they could still have been being used.

A lot of silly jokes were being thrown around by everyone to try and lighten the atmosphere; at first it worked, but we were placed in four groups and introduced to the tour guides too soon for our liking.

At first you walk into a reception area with large pictures and a lot of information along the walls and a few kiosks selling information booklets and survivors' accounts. This helped calm my nerves, it made the beginning of the tour not seem too harrowing. Inside the camp the buildings looked as if they had been built for a specific use. Many of us felt this because of their strategic positioning.

Our tour guide soon told us that before Auschwitz was used as a Concentration Camp by the Nazis, it was originally a barracks for the Polish army and was taken over by the Nazis when the Polish army fell at the beginning of the Second World War. We also found out that there are two Nazi camps named Auschwitz; we were in Auschwitz 1 and this camp itself comprised two compounds, Auschwitz and Berkenau.

Whether the Nazis felt it humorous or not the words "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" have a black humour. These words, which are placed above a gate in the camp, mean, "WORK FOR FREEDOM". I felt that this was a cruel joke, and felt very angry when we were told the translation because the only freedom the prisoners received was in death.

From reception we walked through the 'roads' between the rows of buildings. The first building we were taken into was not as I had expected. There was a long corridor with several rooms to our left and right. We were taken into most of these rooms; here they were only filled with large pictures and told the history of Second World War camps.

As everyone knows it was mainly Jews that were placed in camps but gypsies, prisoners of war and other sections of the community were also rounded up by the Nazis and locked away. Most camps were not death camps to begin with, they were working camps. Yet as Hitler grew to gain more power and a more evil mind he soon ordered people to be killed, like the Jews. Auschwitz was one of these camps, gas chambers and a crematorium were soon built and the prisoners in the camp were ordered to burn the bodies.

The next barrack block that we entered was exactly the same as the previous in appearance. Downstairs there were more pictures and in display cases we could see documents and letters. However, when we went upstairs the atmosphere was totally different to everywhere we had been so far. I do not think anyone expected what was coming. We followed our tour guide into the first room and already you could sense the atmosphere change. We saw a display case full of spectacles; they had been confiscated from the prisoners as they entered the camps, the Nazi officers in the camp may even have used some. As previously mentioned we had been split into groups, and as we walked into the next room we could tell that the tears would soon be flowing from the tear stained faces of the others. As we walked through the door we saw a display case that stretched the entire length of the room, from floor to ceiling. It was piled full of women's hair. We were told that as women entered the camp their hair was cut off and then used to fill pillows and such like. All of the hair that had been found in the entire camp was now placed in this display case. From the sheer volume of it you felt your heart breaking for all of those women who had probably died, and as predicted the tears did flow.

There were a lot of display cases like this, from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, bulging with all sorts of artefacts. We saw suitcases, clothes and shoes; when we saw the shoes I was reminded of the film Schindler's List: a black and white film in which a little girl with a red coat is suddenly seen walking through the masses of people. In this case there was a sea of dark shoes and in the middle, was a tiny, red child's shoe.

However none of this was as bad and upsetting as that which we were about to see. Everyone was walking quite slowly to the next building; no one really wanted to go in. From everyone's shock-ridden tear stained faces a lot of us didn't want to see anymore, but there was something about Auschwitz that made us go in. Part of me wishes I hadn't but then I would not have felt the way I did. The corridor had pictures of women on one side and men on the other and under each picture was the dates when they entered the camp and when they died, hardly any had a blank date which suggested that they escaped as Auschwitz was brought to its knees. We went into a room to our right, one of the teachers did not come in and as soon as I walked through the door I could see why he didn't. The back wall was full of pictures of children. Our tour guide told us about them: some went to another camp, some died and some were used in experiments. This alone made me feel sick but as I saw what was in a display case I lost control of the tears I was desperately trying to hold back. It was filled with babies' clothes, the horrible thing about it was that I knew straight away that none of these babies would have survived, they were destined to die the moment they entered the camp. What work could they do for the Nazis? At this point I had to walk out and did not see what else was in that room; to be honest I do not want to.

Next we were shown the wall of death. It was found in between two of the cellblocks and was where prisoners were shot rather than placed in the gas chamber. Our tour guide also took us into one of the cellblocks. This time instead of climbing a flight of stairs we descended and saw the cells below ground, including the dark cell. This was completely in darkness, hardly any light coming through from above ground unlike the other cells and no window in the door. We were told it may have housed more than one person at any one time and if they were in there long enough they could have died from suffocation.

The cell at the end of the walkway, unlike the others, had its door open to display the graffiti on the walls and door itself. On one of the walls there was a drawing scraped into the wall, of Jesus. This was pleasing in a way because we saw that even though that person was in a terrible position and was likely to die they still felt that their faith meant something. I think that, whether you have any faith or not, it is pleasing to see and know that in a place like Auschwitz they would believe in something so much that their belief stayed with them even though their life may be ended and they may not have done anything wrong.

As we were shown a gas chamber and crematorium, it was not anything like I had expected. It looked like a grass mound with chimneys from the side but as you walked to its front you could see it was a building. We walked in through a door and were led into the chamber itself; it was just a vast, empty space. The room adjoining it was about half the size, the rest of it was the incinerators. I felt quite sick again and could not believe how someone could place a dead body into an incinerator, knowing that they had been murdered. However, I then realised that these people would have known that if they did not gather up the dead bodies and burn them then they themselves would have been gathered up, killed and burnt by someone else. They did it to keep their life, and again I felt anger boiling up inside me towards the Nazis.

Berkenau was very different from Auschwitz. There are no buildings here, just long, narrow wooden barns. Here there were no trees, and I did not see any birds fly over head; it did look very empty and desolate. It is a big square field, the outer perimeter shown by tall barbed wire fences. It is here that the railway shown in all those old war films ends, not Auschwitz. When we arrived the atmosphere in the coach was extremely different to that inside Auschwitz. We had had time to talk about different things other than death, and we were all quite calm, we knew what to expect and were not alarmed by what we saw, it was not as bad as Auschwitz had been.

The first thing that we saw was the lookout point and the arch where the trains would enter, as suggested by the track. We were able then to see a birds-eye view of the entire camp from up in the lookout point. It was just a sea of wooden shacks, and if you put your mind to it you could see the prisoners marching around the camp in single file with Nazi soldiers shouting at them, not a nice thought.

The only hut we were allowed into at Berkenau was made from wood. It had wooden frames running down the length of the hut which were the beds the prisoners would have slept in. They were three levelled bunk beds. They would have contained around five people on each bunk and they would have had to climb into bed at the foot of the bunks, due to there being hardly any gap between each set of bunks. The only toilets provided in these huts ran down the walkway, they were just circular holes. The atmosphere inside the hut was not very nice, the old and musty smell helped contribute to this.

Our tour of the camps ended here, we spent around three hours inside a concentration camp, I do not think many of us would have the guts to do it again. On the journey back to our hotel we had a chance to look back on what we had just seen, it was not pretty. While on the tour we had not really taken any notice of the things and people around us, yet when we went back to Auschwitz to drop the tour guides off, many of us did not like what we saw. Families were there with young children; and I do not feel that it is right to take young children into a place like that. They would not be able to understand what they were seeing and being told, and if they were old enough to understand then it could scare and scar them for life. At fifteen we thought that we were only just old enough to be able to handle that sort of experience.

It was the most traumatic day a lot of us had ever experienced in our lives. However the rest of the holiday made up for it, we went shopping in Krakow and Prague!! Looking back on that day spent in Auschwitz I am glad I went and saw what I did. Nowhere else can you see and understand how man can be truly evil towards man. Even though, like many people, we roughly knew what had happened during the Second World War, here you saw what it was like to have your life snatched away from you by someone whom you have never met before. We learnt how these people lived. We learnt that they did everything they were told to do because they knew that they were no longer in control of their own lives and that their punishment could be death! They lived a life of fear. This experience has taught me that no one has the right to take away life, and that people should not be persecuted because they do not believe what you believe, because they do not lead the life you lead, because they are different! I have learnt that no one is like another person and that this is not a bad thing, it shows individuality and specialness. Everyone is special because they have a right to life!

KIERA GREIG