THE PEMBROKESHIRE HERALD FRIDAY JANUARY 30 2015


Like us on Facebook facebook.com/thepembrokeshireherald


liberation of AuschwitzJanuary 27, 2015 An emotional visit to the camp of death


49


JANUARY 27 marked seventy


years since the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp. Each year, the world comes together on the Holocaust Memorial Day to remember the devastation. Herald reporter Megan Gray-Power recently visited the camp. She reports how her visit to Auschwitz emphasised the harsh reality of the concentration camp, and was an emotional experience she will never forget


KRAKOW is a picturesque


city, which has moulded and metamorphosed through the times. A walk through the newer part of the city was aesthetically, as well as culturally, pleasing. I expected a city which would look battered and bruised.


For lunch, we stopped in a Jewish restaurant which had been established before the second world war. The family had been brutally kicked out of their restaurant and home and forced into the Krakow ghetto. It was years after the liberation of Auschwitz that the youngest son re-opened a new restaurant.


When entering the older town, the contrast between new Krakow and old Krakow was blatant. This was the city that I had expected. Walking to the Krakow ghetto, a tour guide pointed out bullets in the walls and buildings that were almost demolished. The Krakow Ghetto was a major Jewish ghetto created by the Nazis to hold the Jewish like cattle. There were thirty-three steel chairs placed around


AUSCHWITZ: FACT FILE AUSCHWITZ was a network of


German Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II. It


consisted of Auschwitz I


(the original camp), Auschwitz II– Birkenau (a combination concentration/ extermination camp), Auschwitz III– Monowitz (a labor camp to staff an IG Farben factory), and 45 satellite camps. Auschwitz I was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. The first extermination of prisoners took place


in September 1941, and Auschwitz II– Birkenau went on to become a major site of the Nazi "Final Solution to the Jewish question". From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe, where they were killed with the pesticide Zyklon B. At least 1.1 million prisoners died at Auschwitz, around 90 percent of them Jewish; approximately 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp.[1][2] Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Romani and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet


prisoners of war, 400


Jehovah's Witnesses,homosexuals, and tens of thousands of people of diverse


the ghetto, emphasising absence. The piece was created by architects Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Latak in 2005 and it symbolised how I felt being there to perfection. The


next day I went to the


Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.


Some of the barns had been converted into museum-like exhibits. Among the displays of shoes, toys and clothes, there was an entire display of human hair. Although there were pictures of prisoners in the display buildings, this really emphasised that people had actually lived here. The tour guide went on to invite us into what he called the bedrooms. The living conditions are indescribable. Rows of wooden bunk beds were the


nationalities. Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments.


In the course of the war, the camp


was staffed by 6,500 to 7,000 members of the German Schutzstaffel (SS), approximately 15 percent of whom were later convicted of war crimes. Some, including camp commandant Rudolf Höss, were executed. The Allied Powers refused to believe early reports of the atrocities at the camp, and their failure to bomb the camp or its railways remains controversial. One hundred and forty- four prisoners are known to have escaped from Auschwitz successfully, and on October 7, 1944, two Sonderkommando


only thing to fill the room. The bottom bunk was inches from the floor, which was home to many rats and insects. The prisoners did not have anything to sleep with and the roof barely kept the rain out, so they had spent their nights cramped, wet and freezing.


The gas chamber was the last


thing to be seen on the tour. I expected myself and the group to enter and suddenly be struck with tears. Yet, both myself and the group were overtaken by a sudden stillness. Silence. I could not relate to what had happened in this place less than one hundred years before. The reality is that anyone who did not experience the dominance of the Nazis from 1933 onwards cannot begin to comprehend what it was like to be Jewish during the time Hitler was


units—prisoners assigned to staff the gas chambers—launched a brief, unsuccessful uprising.


As Soviet troops approached Auschwitz in January 1945, most of its population was evacuated and sent on a death march. The prisoners remaining at the camp were liberated on January 27, 1945, a day now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the following decades, survivors such as Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, and Elie Wiesel wrote memoirs of their experiences in


Auschwitz, and the


camp became a dominant symbol of the Holocaust. In 1947, Poland founded a museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, and in 1979, it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.


Anne Frank: Died at the age of 15, her diary has been translated into 70 languages


Fuhrer. standing in


The feeling that I had while the gas chamber was


not something that I have ever felt before, or something that I think I will experience again. Tony Blair once questioned


whether there should be a Holocaust Memorial Day. Many have suggested that Auschwitz should be demolished out of respect for the survivors and their families. My trip to Auschwitz cemented my view that the Memorial Day is important, the Holocaust is not something that should be forgotten. It is also essential for Auschwitz-Birkenau to remain to serve as a reminder of the atrocities that can happen to humanity.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88