Storytellers: Auschwitz, the Holocaust Educational Trust and humanity

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

Three weeks ago, on March 17th, I quietly slipped away from LabourList for a day to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. Having studied history, I’d always felt it was a place I wanted to go to; in some ways I felt it a duty to those who had suffered there and died there, and to the generations who live on. Although I’d always anticipated I’d go independently, I felt privileged to be invited on a day visit by the Holocaust Educational Trust as a guest on their Lessons from Auschwitz project.

It goes without saying that Auschwitz is an emotive place. But before I visited, I told Karen Pollock and Paul Evans from the Trust that I would try not to hold any expectations of how I would feel when I got there or on reflection: I didn’t want to prejudice my own views of what it would be like. Karen and Paul reassured me that that was a good approach to take, that everyone has different and subjective responses to visiting the place.

So on a long day, I travelled with an open mind. For a similar reason, I’ve deliberately taken my time to write up the experience, because it’s one that I think needs perspective.

That said, my most immediate reaction still prevails. It is an unusual reaction, and on return I spoke to Karen at some length: I wanted almost to explain it to someone and seek justification for it. Because, oddly, I felt happier and lighter than I had done for some time. Without revealing too much of myself, I’ll try to explain why I think that is.

Holocaust

One of the most challenging things about understanding the holocaust is the numbers. How can we comprehend any level of tragedy expressed most frequently in seven cold digits? As people often say, it’s impossible – we have to think of one personal tragedy, one family broken, followed by another, followed by another. Even that process is too scientific. Knowingly, the personal letters handed to the project’s participants express each of those human stories powerfully: how can you not be affected by the sentence “It’s eerie to think that by the time you read this I will probably be dead”, in a long letter signed, simply, “Mama”?

Those are the questions asked by the educators – the guides on the trip – throughout the first stage of the visit through Auschwitz, the old Polish army barracks that became first a prisoner of war camp, and later housed gas chambers which murdered 15,000 people. As visitors, we walked through those dank brick buildings, passed ovens and back out into a place that felt more like a university campus than a death camp. We walked passed casing after casing of hair and eye glasses and children’s shoes and children’s toys.

And then we walked back out again, in procession.

There’s always something surreal about being in a place you’ve seen in pictures so many times before. In that weird sense, Auschwitz I, as it is known, is familiar. Inevitably, though, it can feel a bit like another museum. There’s never enough time to really study the names or think about the people who were there or their lives. It’s an exhibition and all a little clinical; these rooms had become detached from the stories they seek to tell – something to be interested in, rather than connected to. So no one spoke to one another or made eye-contact as we walked around; there was only space for looking at the ground, attempting quiet and personal reflection.

That is not the case with Auschwitz II, Birkenau. Where the first camp formerly served a purpose for living people, the character of which is still partly retained, the second camp was created as a death camp. This is where 1,500,000 people were killed. It was built for death, and it tells: it is industrial, bleak, cold and remote. With snow on the ground as it was, it was a long, hard winter.

But, oddly enough, while Auschwitz is familiar and Birkenau brutal and horrific, I took away more human feeling from the latter. Perhaps that was because more human stories are passed on by the educators there, or because one building contains photographs of the victims as free people, living, before the killing began, or because I was asked myself to read aloud the story of Elie Wiesel’s separation from his family as he came off the train.

Whatever it was, as I walked around the camp, the pieces of shrapnel of the people’s lives we’d seen in the first camp in hair and shoes started to fit together again in my mind: I started to look for the life, rather than the death.

Kitty Hart-Moxon, a survivor who still works with the HET, chose to work in the sanitary building, a God-awful place within a God-awful place. But she chose to do it because it gave her time to talk to everyone. That gave her hope; it was Kitty’s defiance. More and more in Brikenau, I started to find that brazen human will against the odds, and it was inspiring. And I saw the young people on the visit – for whom the project was developed – interested. They were learning, and then they got to walk away. In such a horrific prison, and having seen such the machine of such purposeful and systematic murder on such a brutal scale, that’s intensely liberating, like nothing I’d known before.

Education

The Holocaust Educational Trust was established in 1988 with the intention of educating young people of every background about the Holocaust. It’s a human memory project, rooted in the need to learn from history, lest its tragedies be repeated. The HET’s Lessons from Auschwitz scheme aims to teach sixth formers, in particular, about the Holocaust through direct experience, to create ambassadors and educators back home in real communities. I guess that’s why I’m writing about it now. Because for a generation that has allowed genocide to persist, the HET’s very existence and message cannot be overvalued: it is an incalculably important thing, that we should talk about and pass on.

But there are problems with the project. Each school gets to send only two pupils, and although the schools themselves get to decide which of their students would most benefit, I did get the impression that many are chosen for what they might bring to the day, rather than what they might take from it. And although the Trust sets guidance for who should be considered to visit and on what criteria, they receive no information on the students’ demographic backgrounds or educational needs, and therefore have no way of measuring whether they are serving the highest achievers over those more disadvantaged students who would most benefit from such an experience in academic and in social terms. Although I was told that this was an inner-city London school, most of the students were bookish already; few had the London twang I recall from my school days. That may sound trite or politically subjective, but in the context of what the HET is trying to achieve, I think learning about the students who make the visit – and trying to serve those who may need these lessons the most – is important.

And while I thought it was moving and productive to have a rabbi along, partly leading the day, and I enjoyed his sermon and his prayers and his evident passionate commitment to educating young people about human waste, his speech at the end of the railway line grew moved to quickly from inspiration to evangelist for my taste.

Trust

If the purpose of the Lessons from Auschwitz project is to tell the story of the Holocaust through human experience, and even though I’d tried to train myself to avoid expectation, my response was, in the end, one that I could never had anticipated. It was one of real positivity, genuinely a new lease on life. Unconsciously, I chose to look for the humanity of the struggle, rather than the inhumanity of the slaughter. In spite of the hammer and the anvil, and the horrendous, incomprehensible nature of the place, there is real humanity there, in its purest expressions – in survival and in solidarity. To my mind, that is the HET’s greatest value. It makes each one of the people fortunate enough to visit – and fortunate enough to leave, as so many weren’t – storytellers.