A place we all should visit

My wife and I have just returned from a break to the magical city of Krakow, in Poland. As beautiful as it was – with stunning architecture and picture postcard horse-drawn white carriages – the most unimaginable horror is an hour’s bus-ride away.

Everyone should try to visit the former extermination camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau at least once in their lives. It is a wholly depressing, draining and moving experience, but utterly necessary.

No one knows how many died in the Nazi death camps. The recorded figure is approximately 1.5m but the reality is that many more were gassed with a pesticide called Zyklon B, hanged, shot, starved, worked to death, left to perish from disease, or subjected to abhorrent medical experiments.

Every step of the visit is harrowing but it was the piles of shoes that affected me most. In particular, one little girl’s pair of pink shoes – not unlike a pair my own daughter once wore – made me cry. Who was she? What life did she leave behind? What untold suffering did she endure?

And the mounds of hair, shorn from the bodies before cremation, to be used in the manufacture of wigs and socks, to generate obscene profits for the Third Reich. Then the vast tangle of spectacles and the prosthetic limbs removed from the disabled. These are just what’s left – the tip of the iceberg – all of them representing a human life, taken in the midst of the cruellest inhumanity.

It’s impossible not to look at today’s children, walking round the world’s most important museum on school visits, and not think of the little ones who came on cattle trucks a generation ago and never went home.

It was a bitterly cold day in Poland during our visit so we wore lots of winter clothing: thick jumpers, scarves, gloves, hats, and coats. We were able to warm ourselves with hot drinks in the restaurant. Imagine what is was the like in the 1940s, during some of the worst winters on record, when those poor families were covered from the ice and wind by just a pair of striped pyjamas.

In the airport, on the way home to North-East England, news came through that Ratko Mladic, “the Butcher of Bosnia” had been jailed for life for genocide during the Bosnian War. In 1995, the former Bosnian commander had contributed significantly to the slaughter in Srebrenica of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the worst atrocity since the Second World War.

More than 100,000 people died during that conflict and 2.2 million people were displaced. Only now has Mladic been brought to anything resembling justice.

There is a powerful quote above the entrance to Block 4 at Auschwitz. It is by philosopher, poet and novelist George Santayana, who wrote: “Those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Seventy years after Auschwitz was established as a museum, so that what happened there can never be erased, so-called ethnic cleansing is still happening elsewhere in the world. It is not ancient history, not black and white – it’s now and in colour.

And that’s why it’s so important to go on visiting the extermination camps: to see what really unfolded, to look at the hair and the shoes the spectacles and the prosthetic limbs, to show our children, and to write about it and broadcast it at every opportunity, in the hope that it can never be forgotten.

UNDERSTANDABLY, in the midst of terror alerts, security procedures are stricter than ever at airports.

A tube of toothpaste, a can of deodorant, and a bottle of contact lens solution – carelessly left in our hand-luggage – held us up and was taken off us at Manchester Airport because they contravened the rules.

What we hadn’t realised until we’d reached the hotel in Krakow was that a pair of foldaway scissors on a key-ring, which my wife had forgotten she was carrying in her bag, had made it through the stringent checks.

FINALLY, it was very nice of Waterstones to put up a poster at the entrance to its Darlington store, promoting my new children’s book, Snowdrop The Spikeshuffler, about a little white hedgehog who overcomes prejudice to become a hero.

That said, the poster could have done with a bit of proof-reading.

I definitely won’t be “singing the book” – as advertised – next Saturday morning. I honestly can’t think of anything more likely to put people off.

I will, however, be “signing” copies of the book, alongside brilliant teenage illustrator Jonathan Raiseborough, whose artistic talents have helped him overcome problems caused by autism.

We’ll be there between 11am and 3pm so please come along to say hello. I solemnly promise not to spoil Jonathan’s big day by breaking out into song.

Well, not unless there are any special requests.