Visiting Auschwitz
Ever heard of a quack English historian called David Irving? Never mind, you haven't missed much. He's the Third Reich sympathiser and voice of those revisionists who flatly deny the Nazis ever planned a Final Solution to the Jewish problem. What the rest of us call the holocaust.There are many different ways to visit Poland's Auschwitz-Birkenau. The most common is to fly to picturesque Krakow then pick up a taxi or any one of the hundreds of buses and luxury coaches that lie in wait outside every hotel. This two hour round trip is a central feature of their thriving tourist industry. So every day you see convoys of vehicles whisking hundreds and thousands of happy sightseers to and from their very own local horror show.Yet there are some destinations where it's not just the getting there that's important - more the 'way' you choose to get there. And perhaps Auschwitz is just such a place. Somewhere that one might experience in far greater depth by sitting still for a while and approaching it the hard way. The 'traditional' way if you'd dare call it that. The way most got there in the 1940's. I'm not suggesting a cattle truck. Just a simple old-fashioned ride in a train, allowing the imagination plenty of time to contemplate what those last few hours and days of life might have been like for the thousands of tortured souls who trod this exact same path some 70 years earlier.I was in Lviv that beautiful city of Western Ukraine. Slap in the middle of holocaust country and just an overnight train ride away from Oswiecim, the haunted village the Germans once called Auschwitz.Before the outbreak of WW2, Lwow was part of Poland. Before that it was Lemberg, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Dear old Lviv. If there was ever a city with reason to suffer an identity crisis, this is the one. Situated slap-bang on the epicentre of Europe's biggest political fault line - Lviv began the war as Polish, got ceded to Russia via the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, was then invaded by Nazi Germany - and was finally claimed back by Russia and sucked up into Stalin's burgeoning new empire. Welcome to Lvov (that's how the Russians spell it). Confused? Just think how the independent (since 1990) citizens of Lviv might feel today. Particularly the elderly. Those who survived.In case you didn't know, back in 1939 Lviv's population was over 30% Jewish. Many of them successful merchants and professionals, living in the beautiful houses and mansions that still stand today around glorious cobbled squares. Galicia, as they once called this neck of the woods, was rich with Jewish culture. Proud synagogues stood everywhere. Hundreds of them. In other words, this was a landscape ripe for the close attention of every tin-pot Nazi seeking to please his beloved Fuhrer and help deliver the dream of a Final Solution to Judaism.Wind the clock forwards. There's an entrepreneur in 2011 Lviv, making pots of money out of opening 'theme' restaurants. One celebrates wartime Ukrainian Nationalists and another, the Lviv-born father of sado-masochism, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. But it was a very different theme restaurants that one day caught my own attention. I was having a drink in a packed-out 'Jewish' establishment called 'Under The Golden Rose'. “Strange”, I thought as I sipped some rather nice, dirt cheap Georgian wine. “I never realised there were that many Jews left standing round here.” There aren't. And those few who have since drifted back to Lviv certainly don't come to eat in this sort of exploitative tourist trap where there are no prices on the menu and diners are invited to haggle with their waiter, only paying the price of what they eventually reckon their meal was actually worth. Got it? Jewish joke. Ha ha! Very funny!Anyway, this thriving restaurant celebrates and overlooks the site of the magnificent 'Golden Rose Synagogue', one of the most spectacular Renaissance buildings in Lviv and arguably the most beautiful of its type in the whole of Europe, built in 1585. I purposely said the 'site' of the Golden Rose Synagogue. Because after torturing thousands of Jews to death within the walls of its citadel, the Nazi's burned the Golden Rose to the ground in 1943. Suddenly this seemed the right time in my own particular life to make the effort and pay a visit to Auschwitz. So the following evening, shortly before midnight, my daughter and I caught a cab to Lviv Station where we boarded an overnight sleeper that would take us across the Polish border and on to the infamous Death Camp.Zzzzzzzz....Freight door slides shut. Footsteps. A whistle in the distance. Another whistle far closer. Ice cold wind. Damp straw. Poignant platform. Machine gun tower. Stench of stale urine. Powerful eyes watching. Disinfectant. Terrified eyes looking away. Men shouting. Orders. Jackboots. How many? Twenty at least. Left-right-left right. Leather on concrete. Steel. Piercing scream. Someone running. “Halt!” “Halt!” Pistols fire. Bang! Steam. Spurting steam from locomotive. Sssssshhhhzz. Dead body. Woman sobs. Child howls. Baby screams. More steam. “Schnell schnell.” More whistles. Pull! Straining metal! Iron couplings. Screech. Starting to move. Screech. Cold metal. Men shouting. “Heil Hitler.” Heels click. Nobody talks. Baby cries. Silence... Zzzzzzzz....Some visitors hear a hollow silence in Auschwitz. A strange silent echo. The tortured howling of ghosts on the wind. The silence of guilt. The imagined stench of burning flesh. A faint whiff of gas. Acid on the tongue. Distant memories refusing to fade. Even the birds are quiet. You can hear a pin drop.Zzzzzzzz....Tchutchoo-tchutchu...Tchutchoo-tchutchu...Tchutchoo-tchutchu... We're off. The rhythmic sound of a massive old electric train on well worn twentieth century track. A cramped couchette. Ironed sheets. Not a cockroach in sight. Bye bye Lviv. There's a long night ahead. Best get some sleep. Tchutchoo-tchutchu...Tchutchoo-tchutchu...The Ukrainian border guard woke us abruptly. “Passports!” An officious individual carrying a pistol. He spoke in monosyllables. We gave him our papers. Unfortunately there's an insignificant and totally unnecessary form the Ukrainian authorities make you sign whenever you enter their country. Something to do with telling the police where you'll be staying during your trip. A typical example of the sort of bureaucracy you always come across in hugely corrupt gangster countries. As an obedient pedant, I'd kept my flimsy piece of paper, carefully folded into my passport. As a typical British undergraduate, my daughter had chucked hers in a bin. So there we were, facing exactly the sort of glorious international crisis that every uniformed official throughout Ukraine dreams about. Any nondescript non-offence that can easily be turned to advantage, in order to supplement a meagre monthly income. Fortunately the daughter speaks fluent Russian.The border guard wanted £50 in cash. “Otherwise I'll kick you off the train and leave you to die in the middle of nowhere.” It was 2.00a.m.I told daughter to tell him, very politely, that I was an important British diplomat and a personal guest of the Ukrainian President. “Tell him I want his full name and address,” I sighed, almost kidding myself with the cold confidence of a disguised trembling voice. She did it with style, staring him straight in the eye. He snarled at her and said he'd be back in five minutes for the money. He still had our passports. “This is bigger than a game,” I thought. “It's not about money. Sod the fifty quid. If it comes to it, we'll pay. Nevertheless, it's true. Remember Kristallnacht? Never let despots like this win, else who knows where we'll all end up.”Meanwhile the train was stationary. We were slap bang on the Poland/Ukraine border – the gateway to the European Union. The place where Ukrainian guards leave the train and new Polish guards take over. It was a classic Hollywood stand-off. Bad Day At Black Rock. Roll the camera. Action.Outside we could hear wolves howling in the forest. Alongside other border guards laughing and joking outside a small hut where there seemed to be some sort of drinking party in full swing. We took a peep along our corridor. Every door was wide open like ours. With another Ukrainian armed guard, not our 'friend', standing lazily to attention at one end, quietly smoking a cigarette.Suddenly a door slammed. Then another. Someone crashing through the carriages at speed. Footsteps. Not stopping. Heavy footsteps. Coming our way. It was him. He stood at our door staring at daughter. Only for a few seconds. She stared right back at him. He paused. Standing tall. Scowling. Saving face. Goons like this are never beaten. They always call the shots. Even in defeat.“If it was up to me I'd have you both deported,” he snarled, tossing our passports across the carriage. Then he turned on his heel and was gone. Seconds later the train slowly began to move, taking us out of Ukraine and on towards our ultimate destination.Nothing prepares you for Auschwitz-Birkenau. It doesn't matter how much you've read. Or how many documentaries you've watched. Being there is different.But not for everyone! There are those who rush about. Pushing prams. Out on a day trip from Krakow. Having seen the castle and cathedral and now with time to spare before the plane home.Pointing their mobile phone cameras at gas chambers. Or yard after yard of human hair. Whizzing past piles of long forgotten shoes. Staring blankly at a massive pile of pre-war artificial limbs. Gawping at chimneys down which cans of Zyklon-B were emptied onto countless unsuspecting shivering souls waiting for a shower. Photos of naked women and children. Striped uniforms stained with blood and much else beyond description. Passing a walled room without so much as a twitch - a room with just enough space for four bodies to stand up when they are squeezed tightly together. Before the door is closed. Forever. Having their photo taken - smiling happily in front of the famous sign saying 'Work Makes You Free'. Or on the rail platform at Birkenau with a background view down to the infamous 'Gate of Death'. Looking for bullet holes at the horrendous wall, before which thousands of tottering skeletons stood for a final time. Before a bored Nazi with a smoking machine gun lazily squeezed the trigger.But no. That's not fair. Perhaps this is the only way they can possibly comprehend something so bestial, so barbaric. A semi-detached, TV generation's reaction to something so far removed from the X Factor that it's way beyond the only armchair reality they've ever known. Anna showed us round. A Polish mother of two who wouldn't be alive today had not an SS guard in 1943 accepted a gold watch from her grandfather as a bribe that saved her grandma from the cattle-train to Birkenau.We were lucky. Anna was a marvellous guide who knew her facts. The only thing that bothered me was that she kept going on and on justifying the very things I could clearly see with my own eyes.So much so that eventually I asked her: "Anna me love. Why do you keep going on and on, trying to justify everything you say? I can all see it clearly with my own eyes. I believe. Why do you take such trouble to legitimize the history of Auschwitz? Are you that concerned about Neo-Nazi Holocaust denial?""Yes", she replied. "They're out there everywhere. They'll never go away. That's why we have our museum."Which took me straight back to where I began, with that controversial English historian, David Irving. And the whispering ashes of countless murder victims, scattered anywhere and everywhere across this chilling landscape in a secluded corner of South Eastern Poland.
Stuart Kerr ● 2238d26 Comments ● 2235d