is bound to live through it again.” George Santayana
'Work brings freedom'
Ever since I read this quote “The one who does not remember history
is bound to live through it again” while visiting Auschwitz in Poland this week, I can't get it out of my head. It's constantly ringing, banging around my mind and nothing I do can get it out. The effect of these words combined with the effect of Auschwitz is extreme.
As a modern history student, I am currently studying Nazi history - the rise and fall of Hitler, Nazism and what came next. I've been learning about Hitler in history classes consistently since the age of 14 and I was slowly becoming bored and desensitized, repeating facts and bullet-point flashcards, geared towards getting top marks in GCSEs, A-Levels and longing for the day when I never have to see another textbook about Hitler again.
Visiting Auschwitz made me realise something that I've known all along but forgotten - the facts I've learned? The flashcards I've made? The essays I've written while watching TV and being on twitter? These things actually happened and my insensitive heart was snapped back into reality after standing in the terrible place where these facts actually happened.
Auschwitz is a horrible, bleak and depressing place. When you are seeing with your own eyes the pain that millions of people endured, and you hear the stories of 9 year old girls being shot and starvation of such an extreme that led to a survivor saying the words 'True starvation is when you look at another man as a meal', it is impossible not to be affected. The Nazis' truly believed that these people - Jews, Gypsies, Ethnic minorities, Homosexuals, Polish, Soviets etc. - were not human. I've learnt this sceptically but when you see, actually see, with your own eyes the furnaces where they forced prisoners to burn the corpses of their own relations and you see the hundreds of thousands of shoes, babies' shoes, that were discovered afterwards, you just know that the Nazis' actually believed that these people were not human. Because the eerie detachment of Auschwitz and memory of everything that happened there is inhumane.
The shoes of the prisoners
There were three parts of my tour of Auschwitz which I think will haunt me forever. However, I think it is important to write them down and let other people read them because it needs to stay in people's memories to stop anything like this ever happening again.
Firstly, the hair. Above is a picture of the shoes of prisoners and in the next room was, behind a glass case, the hair of the woman who heads were shaved after they died, so the Nazis' could sell the hair to the textile industry and make a profit. When the Soviets took over the concentration camps, they found tonnes of womans hair, packed in bags, and now mountains of hair are eternally behind glass. I couldn't look at it for long as it was just so real and so sad.
Secondly, we were brought to 'death wall', a wall and a square piece of land in front of it. A sign by this piece of land said 'Please be silent in respect of the thousands of people who were shot by the SS [Nazi police force] by this wall.' Standing in this square, looking at the same sky which the prisoners would have looked at and just the knowledge that I was standing in exactly the same place where thousands of innocent men, women and children had been killed only 65 years ago, was a moment that is ingrained in my memory.
Lastly, we went into a long corridor in a building where the prisoners used to sleep. Covering the walls of the corridor were A4 photos of all the prisoners, and underneath each photo, their name, date of birth, date of arrival to the camp and date of death. The Nazis' liked to order everything, label everyone and know what kind of prisoner was - they tattooed each person on entry with a specific code. When the Soviets took over the camp in 1945 they found themselves with many young children who had forgotten their own names and only knew their numbers.
I looked through each of the photos and I found one I couldn't look away from - a photo of a girl born in 1927, who arrived in the camp in 1943, aged 16. My age. The photo was at eye-level with me and as I looked into the eyes of this girl, who was no different to me, it was difficult to know that this was a 16 year old girl like me and my friends, who had existed like I do now, and spent two months in the concentration camp being starved, treated like an animal and tattooed with an identification code before being killed in the same gas chamber I stood in 68 years later.
Auschwitz is a horrible place but also a place which I think it is important to maintain so that people can visit it in thousands of years to come and have their own experience of it. I'm sorry that this blog post was so depressing but at least its the truth. Visiting Auschwitz made me become aware of so many things- how insignificant our problems of schoolwork, nagging parents and teachers, relationship issues, our celebrity-obsessed culture and other small worries are in comparison to what these people, condemned to dusty history textbooks in libraries and Edexcel syllabuses, suffered for years on end. And what other people are suffering in the world, even today. I'm scared for the future and I want do something meaningful, to make sure this atrocity I have been exposed never happens again and I want to save people from what I know is happening but I can't understand until leave this place and see the real world. We must not forget the past and now I realise this is so we can learn from it - a cliché I've heard many times but not really understood till now.
