I will never forget

I have now returned to London after a blessed few days in Krakow, Poland. I need to reflect a little more before writing up a more thoughtful post on my time in Krakow; however, I would like to share with you a reflection on my time at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which my lecturer asked me to write.

Auschwitz has been a place which I have always wanted to visit. I learnt a little about the Shoah (holocaust) in secondary school but since then I have not studied it further in any significant depth. Since studying a module on Judaism in my second year of undergraduate study, and after my first conference with the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ) in Istanbul 2010, and my subsequent involvement with the Holy See’s emerging leader group in Jewish-Catholic dialogue in February 2011, I soon realised that the Shoah was still a subject matter which could not be laid to rest; despite the passing of over five decades since the end of World War II, the Shoah remains an open and aching wound for the Jewish people. As someone who has no Jewish links, other than for the fact that I am a Catholic and share the majority of my sacred text, the Bible, with the Jewish people, and as someone who has had no family loss associated with Auschwitz, or indeed any other death camp, it was very difficult for me to share that sense of loss with my new Jewish acquaintances. Of course, I hear this figure of millions of people being exterminated at places like Auschwitz regularly, but it is such a number that proves difficult to comprehend. One can feel sympathy, but it is very difficult (at least it was for me) to feel that sense of loss. My frustration with grappling and accepting this reality highlighted for me the need to visit Auschwitz; I reasoned that a tangible encounter with this shrine of infamy might help me to see as victim’s eyes see.

“Arbeit Macht Frei.” As I finished attaching my earphones to my radio for the ‘Auschwitz tour’, I gazed upwards and ahead I saw that notorious sign above the entrance to ‘Auschwitz I’ reading: ‘Work Sets You Free’; what greater paradoxical statement could one have above such a departure point from ordinary life, I thought. As I walked through the camp viewing prison cells, torture rooms, the ‘Death Wall’, and miles of barbed wire fences, I remained very quiet, attempting as best as I could to absorb all that I was seeing. Nothing really prepared me for what I was to encounter in Blocks 4 and 5 however: ten thousand pairs of children’s shoes, a fraction of the number belonging to the estimated one hundred thousand children exterminated by the Nazis; forty-four thousand pairs of adult shoes; hundreds of spectacles; and perhaps most shocking of all: cut hair from over one hundred and forty thousand corpses belonging mainly to Jewish women, which were recycled and turned into blankets and other products for German citizens during World War II. Speechless is not the correct word to describe my being at that point in time since I had remained silent pretty much up until then; ‘thought-less’ in the atypical sense of the word is probably most apt. How is a person meant to reasonably conceive of the systematic and industrial scale of this human destruction, so efficiently implemented and well thought out even to the point of discerning a use for the hair of the deceased? I was instilled with this sense of horror after viewing first hand this corporeal evidence of Nazi savagery.

From Auschwitz I, my group made its way by coach to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Due to my ignorance, I was not aware of the multiple camps in Auschwitz, the town now known as Oswiecim. The two main images I had of Auschwitz-Birkenau were the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ sign and the main guardhouse through which trains arriving at the camp passed. I now know that these were in two different camps. What first struck me was the unobtrusive nature of the main guardhouse; I had always imagined it to be much bigger than it actually was. Despite Birkenau being a lot larger in size to Auschwitz I, many of the buildings had been destroyed making it difficult for me to work out how far the camp extended.

As I journeyed with the rest of the group to the far end of the railway track where a memorial now stands, we commemorated along the way various groups associated with the camp, including the perpetrators. By the memorial, there was the singing of the Kaddish, a Jewish prayer for the dead. In many respects, each of the events that day in Birkenau were moving, but what will stick with me most is my walk back to the main guardhouse along the railway track. As I looked down at the wooden slats on which I stepped, I thought about how these bits of wood have in many ways experienced all that we were commemorating. These tracks experienced the arrival (and only the arrival) of these groups of cattle-packed people, who in many instances had travelled for days to get to this fatal point. These tracks have heard the cries and screams of mothers separated from their children and husbands from their wives. Carriage after carriage, day after day, year after year: the same routine. For me, these inanimate objects have absorbed all the horrors which took place in that camp, and have been sentenced to a voiceless existence for eternity, unable to share all that they have seen and heard. The gas chambers have gone, the railway tracks are now inactive, and today groups of people arrive in droves, but unlike days gone by, these same groups also depart. Apart from the chanting of prayers, and the quiet conversations between individuals, an atmosphere of serenity and silence was my experience of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Two days later, whilst praying alone Vespers (Evening Prayer) in the chapel of the lay community in which I live, the reality of my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau finally caught up with me. It was at that point in which I felt that sense of loss that I had not felt up until then. I will not forget the image from Birkenau of an aged Jewish couple clutching hands with the wife resting her head on her husbands shoulder. They were grieving. I now realise that the memory of the Shoah is still so important because there are people today who still need to grieve.

St. Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us.

Benedicite.