‘Hearing is not like seeing’

Ruth Campbell joined pupils from our region on a trip to Auschwitz. This is what they saw. This is how they felt.

IT is the sight of one tiny, crumpled leather shoe among the battered heap of 40,000 pairs belonging to the victims of Auschwitz that gets to me. With its T-bar strap and rounded toe, it looks just like the sort of first shoe a toddler would wear today.

Under the dust and the scuff marks, you can see that the softened, yielding leather has been polished over and over. I imagine a loving parent buffing it to a shine with a cloth, the same parent who would have done up the little buckle so carefully for a child not yet old enough to do it for him or herself.

And now here it is, on display in a death camp museum.

I am with a group of 200 students, including some from Northallerton, Thirsk, Ripon, York, Whitby and Scarborough, on a day trip to Poland to visit the former Nazi death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where up to 1,500,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed, the majority of them in the gas chambers.

It has been organised as part of a wider project by the Holocaust Educational Trust, which believes “hearing is not like seeing” when it comes to bringing the horrors of this shameful period of our history alive for the next generation.

Everyone has stopped to stare at the shoes, which have so many stories to tell. Hannah Yeadon, 16, from the Wensleydale School in Leyburn, points to a pretty, colourful, strappy, high-heeled sandal: “They didn’t have a clue what they were coming to. They were deceived right to the end,” she says, shaking her head.

We see where carefully packed and labelled suitcases were taken off new arrivals, their most precious possessions ransacked and sorted to be sold. As well as the shoes, the victims’ glasses, clothes and children’s dolls are now on display in the museum, created within the brick-built buildings of Auschwitz I.

Our guide, Alex, encourages us to remember these things all belonged to individuals with families, hopes and dreams.

This is not difficult for Tom Byrne, 17, from Fulford School in York, whose mother’s family were German Jews. His great-great aunt Edith Kramer, a doctor who was condemned to death after defying Nazi orders to falsify death certificates, narrowly escaped being sent to Auschwitz after a last-minute reprieve.

Tom first came across her written account of her experiences a few weeks ago. She ended up in a labour camp and survived the war but many of the friends she wrote about in her memoirs were not so lucky, says Tom.

Her good friend at the camp, Anna Krasa, who gave Edith her bed when she was forced to sleep on a bare floor, was sent to Auschwitz.

Tom picks out a name written on one of a heap of battered suitcases on display: “It says Anna Kras. It doesn’t have the ‘a’ on the end. But that just might be her friend, the person who lived alongside her and who was so kind to her...” His voice trails off.

A stunned silence descends on the group as we are taken inside the gas chamber of Auschwitz I, the only one still intact. It is smaller than the later chambers built in Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, the second, much larger, purpose- built death camp.

But it is here that this method of killing, using a cyanide rat-poison gas called Zyklon B, dropped through holes in the roof, was perfected.

Some victims died within just a few minutes, but others survived for more than 20.

It is hard not to notice the scratch marks on the walls. One of our group gently touches the harrowing scores.

For some, it is too much. Hollie Bagshaw, 16, from Northallerton College, rushes out of the chamber, past the scoop-shaped trolleys of the crematorium, where other prisoners had to shift the corpses, pulling out gold teeth and shaving hair before thrusting two or three bodies into the furnace at a time.

“I burst into tears,” she explains outside, after she has had a moment to reflect. Hollie, a photography student is recording her experience through her camera lens. “I didn’t take any pictures in there,” she says. “There are some things you just can’t photograph.”

But she is glad she saw it: “I could see so clearly how it happened. It’s all more real now,” she explains.

It seems somehow odd that birds are singing.

And I can’t help noticing a handsome detached house, surrounded by trees, behind a fence about 200 yards away from where we are standing.

That, we are told, was camp commandant Rudolf Hoes’s family home, where he lived with his wife, Hedwig, and their four young children. Hedwig loved the house and referred to Auschwitz as a “paradise”, where they wanted for nothing.

Was his wife aware of what was happening only yards away from her happy family home?

And did those prisoners, women and children among them, hear the sounds of youngsters laughing and playing in the garden as they were herded into the gas chamber?

And did the birds sing then too?

Hollie can’t imagine why no one did anything to stop it. “It’s astounding how this was all allowed to happen, and so many people stood by.”

When we arrive at the Auschwitz-Birkenau 400-acre site, just a few kilometres away, the sheer scale of it takes us all by surprise.

We walk in numbed silence along the railway track which runs through the centre of the camp. One of the original cattle trucks still sits where prisoners were offloaded on arrival.

This is where families were separated, workers herded to the left, the rest to the right. More than 70 per cent of new arrivals here – children, the elderly, handicapped, pregnant women and women with small babies – were sent straight to die.

Being here in Auschwitz affects everyone differently.

Teacher Ben Jones, who teaches religious education and law at Northallerton College, says he expected it to be shocking and harrowing. “But it isn’t like that at all. It’s more poignant really.”

His thoughts, he says, keep returning to his eight-year-old daughter. Like most of the parents here, he finds the thought of children being taken away to die the most difficult thing to grasp.

We walk in the victims’ footsteps to the four brick-built extermination buildings, each with a separate changing room, gas chamber and crematorium, about 400 yards away. They are all rubble now, blown up by the Nazis at the end of the war in an attempt to hide evidence of their monstrous crimes.

We see where human ashes from the furnaces were stored in pits before being spread, with grim efficiency, on local farmers’ fields.

Even the victims’ hair, worth half a mark a kilo, was used in the textile industry.

Beth Payne, 16, from Northallerton College, shudders at the cold, methodical efficiency of extermination on an industrial scale. “Normally, there is some emotion or passion involved in murder. You imagine the people who did it must be evil and full of hatred. But they were cold and indifferent. That’s scarier.”

Lawrence Holmes, 16, from Ripon Grammar School, sums up just how difficult it is for us all to take in what we are seeing. “I find it hard to get my head around the fact it was a real event. I am expecting it to click eventually, but it still feels surreal,” he says.

One of the most moving moments comes at the end of our tour, when we view an exhibition of victims’ family snapshots. They are the sort of photographs we all have at home: parents enjoying picnics with their children, youngsters playing in the snow, parties, weddings, newborn babies.

Annabel Ward, 17, from Ripon Grammar School, is drawn to photos of a young, teenage girl called Fela Roze, whose family perished in Auschwitz. “She is posing, with her arms around her friends. They look just like pictures of me with my friends.”

What a contrast to the haunting pictures of shaven-headed prisoners in striped uniforms that we saw at the beginning of our tour.

“I wish we had seen these family photographs first, so we could identify with them as human beings with other lives,” says Annabel, acknowledging just how effectively the Nazis had drained them of all individuality.

Dehumanising them must have made them so much easier to kill.

At the end of our day, Rabbi Barry Marcus urges us to challenge all prejudice and intolerance, before we join in a minute’s silence. “If we were to hold just one minute’s silence for every victim of Auschwitz, we would be standing here for three whole years,” he says.

I didn’t need to see Auschwitz to believe what happened. I needed to see it to feel it.