Midland pupils visit Auschwitz

Mar 19 2009 by William Oliphant, Birmingham Mail

MORE than 60 years after the end of the Second World War, I’m standing on the train platform at Birkenau wondering how it could have been allowed to happen.

It’s very easy to look at the Holocaust as a page in history and to think of Auschwitz as just a word, especially when you’re sitting at home watching a documentary on the television.

Then you suddenly realise you’re standing at the station where 1.2 million Jews, gypsys, gay people, Russians, political prisoners and other Nazi non-desirables spilled dazed and confused into the light.

With the flick of an SS officer’s hand, they were either condemned to immediate death in the gas chamber or sent to the horror of the labour camps.

That’s why the Holocaust Education Trust has brought me here along with 200 sixth-form students from around the West Midlands. The message is very simple, we must never forget the enormity of the atrocity.

That fact was brought home to us all very early in the day-long trip to the death camps when we visited the nearby town of Oswiecim. An educator from the trust asks students why they think the gates of a Jewish cemetery there would be locked.

The answer. Vandalism? No. Remaining prejudice? No.

There’s simply no-one left to visit the graves. The last Jewish man to live here, a survivor of the holocaust, died here in 2000. The local Jewish population were either eradicated or didn’t want to return.

At Auschwitz students walk under the entrance bearing the sign Arbeit Macht Frei, which means work will make you free, before being taken on guided tours of the barracks where the prisoners were kept.

Here we’re shown items stripped from prisoners. Piles of glasses, suitcases and mountains of human hair cruelly shaved from the heads of prisoners by the Nazis and used to make clothes and fabric.