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I Walked Into Auschwitz Gas Chamber And Thought 'I'm Standing Where Those People Died'


By Samantha Booth

SCRATCHES from the nails of the dying scar the walls of the one remaining gas chamber at Auschwitz, testimony to the 900,000 who suffered a terrible fate in the Nazi death camp.

Thousands upon thousands of shoes - toddlers' booties, elegant high heels, girls' sandals, black leather lace-ups kept for best - have been gathered in monstrous mounds to remind us that every one of those murdered was once a person with a life, future and family.

Even worse are the pigtails shorn from the heads of little girls whose lives were cut short because somebody decided they weren't fit to live.

They were taken from 40,000 of the camp's last victims, harvested by their fellow prisoners to help stiffen the material used to make German army uniforms.

And yet in Scotland, where the Holocaust is not on the national curriculum, many teenagers have never heard of Auschwitz, never mind of the cold, calculating extermination of men, women and children which took place there.

And many believe this murder on a terrible scale could easily happen again unless the lessons from Auschwitz are finally learned.

Which is why the Holocaust Education Trust decided to take a group of Scottish school pupils to the concentration camp.

The purpose was to teach the youngsters how seemingly harmless prejudices can develop into mass dehumanisation and the eventual extermination of millions.

And it is certainly the best way of making sure the deaths of so many innocent people are never forgotten.

Not that their ghosts are ever far away when you visit Auschwitz, something the first Scots pupils to tour the camp with the Holocaust Trust found out.

Grant Thomson, 16, of Drumchapel High School, Glasgow, admitted beforehand he didn't really know what to expect.

The fifth-year pupil said: "I know it is a place that was built with the purpose of killing people and that it was the biggest death camp the Nazis had, but I don't know much more than that.

"I don't know how it will make me feel."

Sixth-year pupil Karen Turner, of Whitehill Secondary School, Glasgow, added: "I only know there were a lot of Jews killed there.

"Some of my friends haven't even heard of it and others want to know why I want to go. But even though I am a bit nervous, I think it will be interesting."

The teens were left in no doubt of just how emotional the day was going to be from the moment we arrived in southern Poland at the infamous camp gates bearing the slogan "Work makes us free".

Seeing the red-brick barracks lined up behind barbed wire, it was easy to imagine a jack-booted SS officer restraining a snarling dog while prisoners in pyjamas and shaved heads cowered in terror.

Harder to visualise was the camp band playing amid the horror.

Almost unthinkable though was what lurked inside. One room houses hundreds of suitcases belonging to the camp's last victims. Many bear their owners' names, addresses and dates of births, hurriedly scribbled when they were told to leave them on the train tracks till later, unaware that there would be no later for them.

One belonged to a little girl called L. Weinberg from Holland. She was eight.

Another room was lined with pictures of gaunt and frightened prisoners, each inscribed with the date of their arrival and their death. It was hard to find anyone who lasted longer than two months.

One room housed baby clothes stripped from infants headed for the gas chambers, in another a picture of a young Ukranian schoolboy sent to Auschwitz for a comment he made in the classroom.

Outside we saw where prisoners were executed by firing squad and in a cellar we saw tiny cells into which the Nazis would cram four men and leave them to starve to death. There was also the room of hair, the mound of shoes and the one remaining gas chamber. An obviously shell-shocked Grant said: "I never thought it was going to be that bad. I knew it had happened but to see the evidence is quite another thing.

"It is so hard to take in that they were all killed for no reason. All that hair was particularly bad."

Karen said: "It was awful. I walked into that gas chamber thinking I am standing where people once died."

But the worst was yet to come.

When Auschwitz One became too small to accommodate the volume of people, they built a new camp next door called Birkenau or Auschwitz Two.

This was where the majority of Jews were taken after the Nazis decided in 1942 that the Final Solution was mass extermination.

Across Europe those deemed "inferior" were squeezed into cattle trucks and taken to Auschwitz, a journey of up to 10 days, often without food or water.

On arrival at Birkenau, stumbling out into the daylight dazed and confused, a top SS officer, often Himmler or Mengele themselves, would make the selections.

Old men and women, pregnant women, babies, children under 14, the disabled, sick and unfit were sent to the gas chambers.

The few who survived were sent to the barracks to try and live as best they could.

That usually meant hard labour on meagre rations in freezing conditions without proper clothes, shoes or sanitation.

For the most, death was just more prolonged than the five to 10 minutes it took to kill the 1200 people they would squeeze into a gas chamber at one time.

Today Birkenau is less of a tourist haunt than Auschwitz One. There are no displays, only occasional reconstructions to show just how horrid life was in one of the dozens of barracks, half of which are now in ruins.

Often sleeping four or more to a bed, the top bunk was highly sought after as not only was it warmer and brutal SS officers couldn't reach that high. And there was nobody above you so you wouldn't get covered in diarrhoea in the night.

THE best way to survive though was to work in the building the prisoners called Canada - a country they thought of as prosperous - where the belongings of those sent to the gas chambers was searched for valuables.

Prisoners who worked there could pilfer food and clothes. On the down side, it meant working next to the queues of unwitting people standing patiently waiting for their turn to be killed in one of the six gas chambers which now lie in ruins.

It was hard knowing the little boy happily playing next to you would be one of the 5000 people cremated in the ovens that day.

Birkenau may lack the macabre displays of Auschwitz One but the air there is thick with death and suffering, something the normally boisterous Scots pupils couldn't help but feel as they stood in the spot where children just like them were sent to their deaths with nothing more than the wave of a hand. Grant said: "Birkenau is really eerie and I couldn't believe how big it was. I have a much better idea now of what it must have been like to have been here. I feel quite moved.

"People definitely need to to know more about what happened here."

And a visibly shaken Karen said: "There are not the same things to see here as at Auschwitz One, but it is all about what you don't see.

"It is scary to think about all those people going to the gas chamber like that.

"The whole experience has been educational and I think it is important we tell our friends at home about it."

As the sun set over Birkenau, the 160 Scots youngsters on the trip each lit a candle in remembrance of those who had died there.

Walking back down the infamous train tracks, the silence among them was an even more fitting tribute to the prisoners of the world's most terrible death camp.

'I couldn't believe how big it was. I have a much better idea now of what it must have been like to have been here. I feel quite moved'