Auschwitz visitors ask 'how did this happen?'

IT WAS snowing when we arrived at the town of Oswiecim near Krakow and saw the only remaining synagogue there.

The reason for its survival, we were told, was because the Nazis had used it as a warehouse.

Before the war, 58 per cent of the town's population was Jewish. Today there are no Jews living there.

The extermination of the town's Jewish population was a small indicator of the horrific stories which awaited the students on their one-day trip. The coaches then converged on Auschwitz I, the concentration camp established by the Nazis in 1940 at a Polish army barracks on the town's outskirts.

The initial purpose of Auschwitz, the German name for Oswiecim, was to house Poles arrested by the Nazis after the German invasion in 1939.

But it soon became part of the machine which attempted to murder an entire people. Our guide used testimonies and the deeply personal stories of survivors to highlight the brutality of what happened on the very ground where students were standing.

They heard the tales of the first experiments with Cyclone B, the chemical used in the gas chambers, and saw the rooms where these took place less than 70 years ago.

Piles of human hair, shoes and suitcases of those murdered were on display behind glass.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, the main death camp built in 1941, was a short drive down the icy road. The first thing students did was climb the tower over the iconic gates through which the rail track ran, carrying people to their death.

Later, standing on the site of the gas chambers Jerome Lyte, a Year 13 student at Bennett Memorial School in Tunbridge Wells, said: "The scale is really brought home. You always see the pictures of the main gate but never these bits."

He mentioned the model of the chambers students had been shown at Auschwitz I. The gas chambers included electric lifts.

He added: "It's the disgustingly organised way in which it was done. The electric lifts – someone would have spent time working out the most efficient way of killing people."

Year 13 Tonbridge Grammar Students Emily ffrench and Charlotte Agran struggled to digest what they had seen. Emily said: "It's asking yourself 'how did this happen?' as opposed to 'why'."

Charlotte added: "And 'how was it allowed to happen?'."

Year 12 students Sian Wadey and Cat Batson, from Uckfield Community Technology College, were similarly affected.

Cat said: "In the museum (in Oswiecim) there was a picture of four little boys and one of them had the same looking face as my little brother. That just got me."

After the tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau the students, teachers and members of the Holocaust Educational Trust gathered for a short ceremony led by students and Rabbi Barry Marcus, who conceived the idea of the day trips.

Rabbi Marcus told those gathered in the freezing cold: "Each and every one of you believe in yourselves and believe you are unique. The people that were brought here were unique too. They had dreams about the future and goals. All that taken away because they happen to have been born in the wrong faith."