Image above: Holocaust Memorial Day artwork by Newcastle Sixth Form College students.
After a very early start and plenty of lively chatter on the plane, these were the first words I experienced when entering Auschwitz 1; the lies that each individual who crossed the threshold of Auschwitz, read.
My schooling had led me to believe that Auschwitz was a place where nothing grows, no wildlife lives and was desolate and uninhabitable. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found a place surrounded by greenery and birds. I wondered how somewhere so alive with wildlife and plants could be home to such sorrow and death.
I didn’t know how to react.
Here I was, walking and standing where people had died. The enormity of where I was hit, and I was moved. We stood in silence; each one of us remembering both the injustice of the acts carried out there, and the varying amounts we knew about the history of the site. I felt a mix of emotion, one of which was gratitude that I now can stand as an individual with protected freedom and rights. I began to feel angry; each one of the men, women and children that had entered Auschwitz had had their civil liberties denied.
Studying history we often look at global events that highlight the repeated atrocities individuals, armies and governments commit. Considering how people have had their lives dictated to them, my anger and sadness mounted. I thought about how, in 1935, Jewish individuals were told how Jewish they were and what defined them as Jewish. Many of these individuals had fought and died for their country – then all of a sudden the soldiers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters were no longer individuals, but labelled Jew. I stood appalled.
I was thinking about the millions of innocents doomed because their religion, practiced in Germany for centuries, was no longer deemed acceptable. How dare one man decide this? I felt cold inside as I thought about this – I struggle to find the words to convey how I felt anger, sadness – fearful? Fearful that wrongs committed continue to happen – robbing yet more people of their future.
As I stand here, facing my future, heading off to university. I think days like Holocaust Memorial Day and the opportunity I was given to travel to Auschwitz-Birkenau - are really important as points to reflect and remember those who have lost their lives in any act of inhumanity, especially those on a mass scale.
Otherwise, as George Santayana said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
