Auschwitz visit leaves lasting memory for Teesdale students, Teesdale Mercury

Auschwitz visit leaves lasting memory for Teesdale students

Dec 22, 2007

Teesdale School students JO BESTFORD and DAVID McKEAGUE were among a party of sixth-formers from the North East invited by the Holocaust Educational Trust to learn about the horrors inflicted on Jews during the Second World War. Here, they give a moving account of their trip.

"THOSE who ignore history are destined to repeat the mistakes of the past." That is why we believe we need to teach the lessons of history to everyone. 

The sun shone down on one of the most infamous places on earth, and somehow, that felt very wrong - awful weather would have felt more fitting.

But as we stood there, we still had shivers down our spines. For we were standing in Auschwitz-Birkeneau, the notorious Nazi concentration and death camp in Poland, which claimed the lives of up to two million people during the Holocaust.

The camp was set up during the Second World War as part of Hitler's ‘Final Solution' to annihilate the entire Jewish population of Europe, and to create a perfect Aryan Germany.

The Nazis eventually murdered 6,000,000 Jews - including 1.5 million children, and to give you some sort of scale, if you were to hold a minute's silence for each of these people, you would have to remain silent for more than 10 years.

The track leading to Auschwitz

Auschwitz consisted of three main camps and many sub-camps.

Auschwitz I was the original concentration camp which served as the administrative centre for the whole complex, and was where about 70,000 people, mostly Polish and Soviet prisoners of war, died.

Auschwitz-Birkeneau was an extermination camp, where at least 1.1 million Jews, 75,000 Poles, and 19,000 gypsies were murdered between 1940 and 1945.

British Government funding has led to the Holocaust Educational Trust setting up school visits to Auschwitz.

Two sixth-formers from every school and college are invited to visit the place where such appalling atrocities took place.

We were the two students who were privileged to be chosen to go from Teesdale.

We were shown around the camp, and saw the registration documents of inmates, piles of human hair, shoes and  clothes.

There were suitcases still with names printed on them, as the Jews were led to believe they were only being ‘re-housed' - some even bought their own train tickets to Auschwitz.

We stood in Birkeneau, the death camp where more than two million people were sent to their deaths in the gas chambers and then burnt in purposely built crematoriums, which Jewish people had to operate, as it was thought too psychologically damaging for the Nazis. This is bad enough without knowing that Jews believe dead bodies should not be cremated, and burial takes place as soon as possible after death.

The tour of Birkeneau concluded with a service which included the Jewish rabbi singing a traditional song for when somebody dies.

This was extremely moving, and we all then lit candles and placed them on the railway track, (another Jewish tradition) which carried more than a million people to their deaths.

Most people would argue that the Germans, the people who ‘knew' of what was happening, should have stopped it; if you knew that people where being killed purely because they do not believe the same things as the majority of a country's society, you would stop it, surely?

However, you don't, and today in the world, people are still being killed, and governments are still ordering deaths of others just because they disagree.

We saw only a fraction of the death camps and concentration camps which operated during the Second World War, however, what we did see will stay with us forever.

The infamous gateway, the railway track, but most poignant of all was the mass of shoes, luggage and human hair.

To see small plaits with ribbons in them seemed to draw attention to the individual stories behind the Holocaust.

The mass of families destroyed, others going into hiding and the amazing stories of the survivors all seemed more important than what we had learned in school. 

Project co-ordinators say the initiative aims to increase knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust on the basis that ‘seeing is better than hearing' and to signal what can happen if prejudice and racism become acceptable.

We couldn't agree more. To read and learn about the camp, one could only imagine what happened there during the Nazi reign. To actually see and visit the camp, made it so real.