History tells us many things. About how things were. About peoples lives. Their work. Their families. Their achievements. Occasionally we get insights into their hopes and dreams.
The hopes and dreams of those Holocaust victims never materialised. Abruptly cut short. In terror. The megalomania of an evil mind in practice.
The number one reason for visiting Poland is our ‘go-to’ for today. Entry is advertised online as being free. So we don’t book in advance. Then, yesterday evening, according to the official website, we discover the only tours in English are four days from now. Russian, French, German & Polish our only options and available places are running out quickly. Not wanting to believe this to be the case, Mr S contacts GetYourGuide. At a price of £75 each we could join an English tour with a 9am start from an inconvenient meeting point. That would mean a 6.30am wake up time – out of the question. We could however, if we’re willing to pay £240 each, (you read right) get an afternoon slot. The term ‘ticket touts’ springs to mind.
With the weather set fine, we decide to turn up on spec. Do a recce. Suss the place out. It’s on our way to our two-nighter at Katowice anyway. Might as well get an outside view at least. Official looking men in dayglow yellow gilets direct us. Their hand-held signs read “Museum Car Parking”. It’s a bit of waste ground. Some inner city scrub, waiting for a developer. They want 40 zloty. We drive in. We drive out. Find the actual official car park. They want 90 zloty. We drive in. We drive out. Beastie gets left in a side street. Told to keep his head down. Zero zloty.
We enquire at the ticket office. There’s an English speaking guided tour at 3pm. A ninety minute wait. Total cost £35! The mind boggles.
We’ve only ever associated Auschwitz with being a Nazi concentration camp. Expecting it to be a place somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. Shamefully hidden. Never considered it to be a town in its own right. We visit a local park and indulge in an ice cream to while away the time.
At 3pm sharp, Magdalena soberly leads our party of twenty-two. It looks as if there could be at least another twenty-two groups. All take turns to enter various blocks on the same planned route. Magdalena tells us the bare sorry facts. No punches pulled. We listen and follow. Auschwitz housed 20,000 prisoners. All stripped of their dignity. Anything associated with being human, taken. Or removed – gold teeth, hair (more than two tons!), prosthetic limbs. Hardly anyone survived. Very few escaped. The enormity of the atrocity numbs the group. With Auschwitz and it’s forty such sub-camps over 1.3 million killed. And for what?
Our tour is in two parts. We now move across into what was the Birkenau camp of death. A town of 100,000 prisoners. The sheer size of the ‘plot’ is staggering. Trainloads arrived daily. Herded in, in carriages. Like cattle. Those that survived the journey were immediately separated. Those that didn’t, incinerated. Men to one side of the tracks. Women and children the other. Destined never to see one another again.
Our three and a half hour tour ends here. At what remains of the massive crematoria.
