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Learn from Auschwitz - fight hatred any way you can - for The Inverness Courier
LAST week I joined pupils from five local schools on a visit to the site of the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. The visit was organised by the Holocaust Education Trust as part of their programme to inform young people about these barbaric events.
We visited two of the sites at Auschwitz, where a combined total of 1.5 million people were murdered. The vast majority of the victims were Jewish but also included Polish detainees, roma, homosexuals. There is confirmed account of one Scot, Jane Henning, being murdered at Auschwitz.
It is almost impossible to imagine the scale of the effort needed to carry out mass murder like this unless you visit the site. The second camp that we visited, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, stretches as far as the eye can see — with huts and railway sidings stretching for a kilometre or more in every direction. There was 'accommodation' for 90,000 people — more than the entire population of Inverness.
What affected me most, and a number of the pupils, was the collection in the museum of the personal effects of those who died. Tons of human hair, mountains of shoes, piles of suitcases bearing the names of their owners. As a recent new father, it was the case of baby clothes taken from murdered infants that caused my tears to flow.
Some people have asked me what the point is of such a visit. The answer is that it is vitally important that these horrific events are understood and remembered so that we can all do our best to ensure that such inhumanity is not repeated.
After all, as was made clear during the visit, the perpetrators of these horrendous crimes were in many respects ordinary people. And the bureaucracy needed to support the mass transit of people for extermination from as far afield as Greece, Portugal and Russia to Poland involved many thousands of people.
The Nazi organisers were motivated by twisted hatred and prejudice to a most extraordinary degree. But we should not be in any doubt either that prejudices and irrational hatreds exist in our society today. Whether it is racism, homophobia, or anti-English prejudice, these feelings do exist in Scotland and the UK and one lesson of the visit for me was that we must never stop challenging these irrational beliefs and promoting tolerance and understanding instead.
One of the most inspiring parts of the visit was to hear the accounts from survivors. If the actions of the perpetrators are incomprehensible, so, too, is the extraordinary resilience, humanity and optimism of people condemned to the camps.
But perhaps most importantly of all, the lessons of Auschwitz have still not been learned in many parts of the world. We failed to stop the genocide in Rwanda and the same is happening again in Darfur while our own government does little more than wring its hands. There are regimes across the world which are murdering, torturing or wrongfully imprisoning their own people. The protests in Burma showed that same spirit of hope for humanity.
If there is any single lesson that I draw from this visit, it is that we — whether politicians, school pupils or anyone else — all have a responsibility to challenge hatred, prejudice and repression. To not do so would be to fail to bear witness to the suffering of so many.
Posted on: 06/11/2007
