Parallels
How does anyone respond to a visit to Auschwitz? Over and above the obvious unbelievable horror of seeing the neatly labelled suitcases of men, women and children, convinced they were just going to have a refreshing shower but never to return, or the piles of hair, or glasses, or shoes, or anything else that could be made use of before they were gassed in their hundreds of thousands, there were two things that struck me more than any of these appalling and distressing sights.
Firstly the scale of the place. I had seen photos and old film clips of the place before my visit, and knew that people had been sent by rail to this death camp, but I still wasn’t ready for what amounted to an actual small railway station within the vast grounds. Or the 5 huge ovens that burned day and night for months just to get rid of the bodies of so many people. Or the particularly sick and cynical sign above the gate proclaiming to the next wave of unfortunate prisoners, whilst being serenaded by the labour camp orchestra to their virtual certain death, that work would set them free.
The second thing is harder to describe. In the village that I grew up in there were numerous children with names I couldn’t spell or pronounce, but I never thought why. We just played football together, went to school together and lived in Elstead together. The reason they were there was due to the refugee camp on the common land on the outskirts of my home village, and the reason why that was there was due in no small part to the hideous place I had just visited. They were displaced Poles, but to me, as a child, and now as an adult, they are just other people I grew up with and still know.
Before I visited Auschwitz these connections to my own home seemed so distant as to be almost totally unrelated to my world in England. Perhaps obviously, the day I travelled to Kracow and then on to Birkenauw I met lots more people who looked and behaved incredibly similarly to me, and to those that I had grown up with. I had also arrived by train, having crossed various national boundaries that just wouldn’t have been open earlier in my life - a throwback still in existence to the war that spawned this terrible place.
I have tried to use the train journey as the metaphor for these connections. At the end of my street is a station similar in size to that at Auschwitz, although fortunately this one is used to transport people to actual work or hopefully opportunities of various kinds that really do exist. Just 3 stops along the same railway line is Brookwood, where lies the largest cemetery in England, and probably the largest in Western Europe. It is so big that it too had its own cemetery station, until the London terminus was bombed in the 2nd World War and the line was closed. It has a vast military section which houses row upon row of plain white gravestones bearing witness to the thousands of soldiers who gave their own lives to finally bring the war, and the death camps to a close.
It also has a small plot on the opposite side of the cemetery where my own grandfather is buried. He died prematurely when my father was just two years old, and as a result was known to neither of us. It was only after mentioning my visit that my dad told me that this is where his own father lay.
It is a odd feeling that I know more about a Nazi concentration camp in Poland than I do about my own grandfather, and as a result I am trying to learn more about both. My visits to these places put into context connections to my own life that I had never previously considered, and although on one level they are worlds apart, they are on another very much inter-related. Our paths and decisions have consequences and impacts far beyond the obvious, and for far longer than we can possibly imagine.
Firstly the scale of the place. I had seen photos and old film clips of the place before my visit, and knew that people had been sent by rail to this death camp, but I still wasn’t ready for what amounted to an actual small railway station within the vast grounds. Or the 5 huge ovens that burned day and night for months just to get rid of the bodies of so many people. Or the particularly sick and cynical sign above the gate proclaiming to the next wave of unfortunate prisoners, whilst being serenaded by the labour camp orchestra to their virtual certain death, that work would set them free.
The second thing is harder to describe. In the village that I grew up in there were numerous children with names I couldn’t spell or pronounce, but I never thought why. We just played football together, went to school together and lived in Elstead together. The reason they were there was due to the refugee camp on the common land on the outskirts of my home village, and the reason why that was there was due in no small part to the hideous place I had just visited. They were displaced Poles, but to me, as a child, and now as an adult, they are just other people I grew up with and still know.
Before I visited Auschwitz these connections to my own home seemed so distant as to be almost totally unrelated to my world in England. Perhaps obviously, the day I travelled to Kracow and then on to Birkenauw I met lots more people who looked and behaved incredibly similarly to me, and to those that I had grown up with. I had also arrived by train, having crossed various national boundaries that just wouldn’t have been open earlier in my life - a throwback still in existence to the war that spawned this terrible place.
I have tried to use the train journey as the metaphor for these connections. At the end of my street is a station similar in size to that at Auschwitz, although fortunately this one is used to transport people to actual work or hopefully opportunities of various kinds that really do exist. Just 3 stops along the same railway line is Brookwood, where lies the largest cemetery in England, and probably the largest in Western Europe. It is so big that it too had its own cemetery station, until the London terminus was bombed in the 2nd World War and the line was closed. It has a vast military section which houses row upon row of plain white gravestones bearing witness to the thousands of soldiers who gave their own lives to finally bring the war, and the death camps to a close.
It also has a small plot on the opposite side of the cemetery where my own grandfather is buried. He died prematurely when my father was just two years old, and as a result was known to neither of us. It was only after mentioning my visit that my dad told me that this is where his own father lay.
It is a odd feeling that I know more about a Nazi concentration camp in Poland than I do about my own grandfather, and as a result I am trying to learn more about both. My visits to these places put into context connections to my own life that I had never previously considered, and although on one level they are worlds apart, they are on another very much inter-related. Our paths and decisions have consequences and impacts far beyond the obvious, and for far longer than we can possibly imagine.
