I’m going to try and put my motivations for wanting to
visit into words, because it’s provoked a number of discussions when I’ve told
people I’ve been. At times, I’ve felt
that I’ve had to justify myself and my reasons for going there. Other people have been hugely interested and
have wanted to know all about my experience. I think it's good that it provokes such debate, as it helps highlight what an emotive experience it was, and still is.
From conversations I’ve had with people over the years,
Auschwitz seems to be a place that people either want to visit. Or they don’t.
Why did I choose to visit?
For me, it’s a way of remembering the horrors that
occurred there and showing my respect to the people who suffered and lost their
lives there, and in other similar camps.
I have no family history linked to Auschwitz, no religious connections,
but it still feels part of my personal history.
My sense of connection comes simply from being human.
As a counsellor, I have a keen interest in trying to
understand humanity and individual life experiences. The holocaust and what took place in camps
such as Auschwitz and on the journeys there, are almost incomprehensible to
me. Trying to imagine the terror and
fear that Jews and other prisoners must have experienced is almost impossible
and my heart goes out to every single one of them. In preparation for my visit, I read a number
of survivors’ stories just to try to understand their experience. Their horror began way before arriving in the
camps. Life in their own homes became an
experience of terror just waiting for what might happen to them. Thinking about it, makes me appreciate just
how very lucky I am. I think it’s easy,
living in twenty first century Britain, to take for granted the safety and
security of your own home and freedom.
And yet I’m also aware that many people today (in the UK and around the
world), for all kinds of reasons, don’t have that luxury that I’m fully
appreciating right now.
What I find even more incomprehensible is the thinking
and action of the Nazis and people involved in the torture of the prisoners. As someone who is generally very accepting of
people, I can’t comprehend the Nazi thought processes of hatred towards the
Jews and other marginal groups. It
seems a very arrogant position to have taken; that they were the better people &
to try to create a ‘pure’ Aryan race. One
of the sad things for me though, is that it’s still going on today; maybe on a
smaller scale, but we still see racism, homophobia, sexism and all of the other
human hatreds happening in the world today.
To some extent, it seems that we haven’t learned anything from the horrors
of the past …
I wonder how many of the Nazi officers truly believed in
what they were doing and how many of them were coerced into behaving the way
that they did. This is another aspect of
the Holocaust that interests me. As
humans, research shows that we do have a tendency to follow those in authority
and to behave in the same way as those around us. I wonder how many of the Nazi officers found
themselves in this position. Maybe not
agreeing with what they were doing, but feeling pressured into ‘having’ to do
it so as to please their superiors and fit in with their comrades? I guess that for their own survival, they
felt they had no choice. To some extent, my heart goes out to those people
too. I wonder how their experience
changed them? And how did they
rationalise what they had been involved in when it was all over? How, for the
rest of their lives, did they live with their memories of the things they’d
witnessed and carried out?
My guide at Auschwitz was telling us that there are
probably many Officers’ diaries still buried at Auschwitz. In the future, I think these will have informative
experiences to tell. Out of respect for
those still living who experienced the Holocaust and for their children and
grandchildren, the diaries are not yet being uncovered.
So to get back to my original question; my motivation for
visiting Auschwitz was to try to comprehend the atrocities that happened there
and across Europe during the Second World War.
For me, being in a place like Auschwitz helps me feel closer to the
experience. To fully understand things,
I have a deep need to experience them for myself; I feel I can’t fully
comprehend anything until I have. Now I
know that I can never personally experience what happened in, and around
Auschwitz (and nor would I want to), but for me, by being there, I felt a
closer connection to it and to everyone whose lives had led them there. Touching the walls of the barracks and the
bunk beds, touched by the hands of thousands of victims helped me feel closer
to them …
Some people I’ve spoken to have viewed visiting Auschwitz
as being voyeuristic. Others have talked
about the disrespect of turning it into a tourist attraction. I think that for some people it maybe is
these things. The guide told us that
some of the barracks have had to be closed to the general public due to graffiti.
For me, the people who choose to disfigure any monument are showing disrespect
and I disagree with their actions.
However, I also see that for some people, the graffiti may be their way
of expressing their feelings towards what happened. I also suspect that some of the graffiti was
carved / written by people not fully understanding the depth of feeling that
others would experience and maybe their naïve way of adding their own mark to
history. I don’t condone any such
actions and whilst I was in Auschwitz I didn’t even want to take any photos of
myself or the person I visited with. For
me, that somehow would have felt disrespectful, and moving towards treating the
place as a tourist attraction rather than the monument I think I see it as.
And the issue of taking photographs have also provoked a
number of comments. I took a lot of
photos whilst I was there. I took photos
of everything that had meaning to me.
And again, I can see how this could be viewed as voyeuristic. But I’m glad I took my photos. I couldn’t take everything in whilst I was
there. Looking at my photos, as I have
done many times since I got back, is helping me process both my experience of
visiting and my ongoing struggle with comprehending. I’m a very visual person. I’ve always loved photos. And when I look back at photos I don’t just
see the images; I feel the atmosphere and the feelings being experienced when
the photo was taken. And what I’ve found
especially strange with some of my photos is the eeriness and bleakness that
are visible in them. Despite it being
the 26th October when I visited, it was an unusually hot and sunny
day (22c) with blue skies.
This photo to the right has had not filters or effects added; it’s just as I took it …
The guide told us that the majority of Auschwitz survivors,
when asked, will say that when they were liberated, they wanted the camps to be
destroyed. However, they’re all now glad
that they weren’t and that they still exist as a reminder of what happened
there.
In my next entry, I’m going to try and put into words my
experience of being there …
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