Journeying back to the Holocaust - Day 3

If you've read my previous posts, you'll know that earlier this week I took part in a two-night, three-day journey to Lodz and Krakow, along with around 40 other people, including three rabbis. The trip was run by J-Roots, a Jewish organisation that creates a unique learning experience - and this was certainly traumatic, thought-provoking, humbling and unforgettable.

For Day One, click here.

For Day Two, click here.

When I read these two posts, I feel that my emotions don't necessarily come across as much as I would have liked them to. And I'm sure that in another week, I'll have plenty more to add.

I've always put off going to Poland. It was something I felt I 'should' do but the time was never right. So why now? That's an interesting question...

My eldest teen visited Poland two years ago with his school, the younger one is due to go at the end of January. These trips are part of their sixth form schooling, and it made me wonder why I had put it off for so long. And I realise the biggest reason was 'fear'.

I've grown up hearing Holocaust stories, speaking to survivors, seeing the tattooed numbers on their arms. The Holocaust is part of my Jewish heritage, though I wish it wasn't. I wish it never needed to be. I wish it had never occurred. This week, I've seen first-hand the sheer brutality of the Nazis, the scale of the pure evil that lurked the landscape, the loss of humanity and identity, the ripping apart of Jewish communities and families, the fact that this was all legalised.

At a time when antisemitism is rising yet again all over the world, this is when we all need to come together, to remember, to educate, to share and to never forget. And I felt that to do that properly, I needed to see it for myself.

This was the right time for me.

As many of you who read Off-the-Shelf Books will know, I am writing Jewish-themed crime fiction. In September, I was first runner up in the DHH Literary Agency New Voices Award for my first three chapters of The Redeemer. I'm now trying to find an agent - the right agent - for my book. The Redeemer isn't about the Holocaust, though it does feature within the plot, but it IS about modern antisemitism, beginning with an antisemitic incident in a park based on real experiences.

I'm now going to give you an account of Day Three, which was all about Auschwitz-Birkenau.

If any factual background is incorrect, I apologise in advance as I'm writing this quickly. I took notes and photos during my visit and I'm using those in order. I also apologise for any typos! Some of the descriptions will be graphic (even more so, in later posts), but I'm not apologising.

Auschwitz 1

We began with Auschwitz 1. I'm not going to go into details of the background - Mr Google can help you there. But Auschwitz 1 is a tourist site, with coffee shops and bookstores, DVDs and postcards on sale. This feels wrong (particularly the postcards). Yet this infrastructure enables people to come and visit for a day, to be educated about what went on here and leave with a book or a DVD that may help them to learn more, to educate not just themselves but others too, particularly the future generations.

If you do visit, read up on Auschwitz first. Read the Jewish accounts, read the survivor stories. Don't rely on your Polish guide to tell you everything that happened there - they may not even mention the word 'Jew' very much. Going with J-Roots was a unique experience. We not only heard individual stories of brutality and survival (each one filled with emotion) as we walked around, but we were WITH a survivor, Mala Tribich (see previous posts). Eventually there will be a time when there are no survivors remaining, so it is the duty of the next generation, and the next, and so on, to keep these stories among us, which is why I am sharing them here. These stories are horrific but I'm not going to apologise as they need to be heard.

It's free to visit Auschwitz  but not, ironically, to go to the loo there - that costs 2 zloties each time. We heard the story of a survivor who visited Auschwitz with J-Roots. When they reached the toilets, he pulled up his sleeve, showed his tattoo and spoke to the woman taking the money at the till. She laughed and let him through.

What did he say to her?

'I have lifetime membership.'

There are no words...

As we stood at Auschwitz, we could feel the chill through our layers of clothing (including thick coats, hats, scarves and gloves), even though it wasn't a particularly cold day. Imagine standing for roll call for up to 19 hours at a time, in just flimsy pyjamas (or even naked if that's what the guards ordered you to do), whatever the weather, unable to move. If 1000 prisoners were counted out to work in the morning, 1000 had to be counted back in - the dead were carried among them as they walked back through the gates, as there would be punishment at roll call if the numbers were inconsistent.

The hospital blocks were called 'waiting rooms for the crematoria', used as places for medical experimentation with very few treatments available.

Block 27 is all about names (I briefly mentioned this in my Day 2 post), set up by Yad Vashem (The World Holocaust Remembrance Centre). When we talk about the Holocaust, we talk about six million Jews. But these aren't six million Jews as a collective, these are six million individuals. Each one had a name, a face, a family, a life, before the horrors began.

Inside Block 27, there are pages and pages of printed names, currently around 4.5 million names, so nearly 2 million left to go. Each Holocaust victim has been given back their identity - and they are remembered.

As mentioned in my Day 1 post, I didn't have any immediate family in Europe at the time. They were all in England already. Some of my family names (such as Levy) are very common but two - Motzner and Sumeray - are more unusual (ironically, one of the people on this trip is a distant cousin of mine - her family used the name Motzney). I checked out the list of names and found both Motzners (Motzni) and Sumeray (Sumeraj/Sumraj in Polish) listed there. I will never know if they were relatives, but it's possible that some of them were.

One block contains the belongings of the Jewish prisoners. We weren't permitted to take photos of the hair that was taken from women murdered in the gas chambers and was used by the German textile industry - you can see the hair woven on a loom. The hair was mainly curly, now faded and greying. I can't even describe the quantity of hair behind the glass cabinet frontage. But I felt physically sick as we walked slowly through the room.

There was a cabinet of the Jewish prayer shawls (tallit), which are indicative of life as a Jew, symbolic at all stages of life and even at death.

Then there were the crutches and prosthetic limbs, the glasses (spectacles), the suitcases the families used to carry their possessions (labelled as if going on a family holiday) - all taken away when they arrived at the camp. The shoes, all shapes and sizes, even sandals, many still retaining their colours.

If you have read any of my tweets or Instagram posts, you'll have seen details of a kosher kitchen. People who keep strictly kosher will eat and prepare dairy meals and meat meals separately - so no cheese on bolognese or in a burger. You also don't eat milk after a meat meal (instead, waiting a few hours), so no Dairy Milk chocolate after your roast chicken. Meat includes poultry. We use separate cutlery, crockery, pots & pans, utensils, chopping boards etc for milk and meat. Then there are parev foods (neither milk or meat), such as all fruit and veg, egg and fish. To make kitchens easier to manage, we try to colour-code the items. Meat items are traditionally red, dairy items are blue and parev items are green, yellow or neutral.

So why am I telling you this?

When Jewish families are told to pack for deportation, what do they take? If they want to eat, they need to pack up their kitchen. See the pots and pans below and look at the colours...

THIS is how Jewish families pack.

We entered a gas chamber and saw the ovens used to dispose of the bodies. These ovens have been reconstructed with original parts. In the larger room - the gas chamber - there are holes in the ceiling where the gas pellets were thrown down.

On Tuesday 19th November 2019, we took this journey into this gas chamber and crematorium, the same journey that 1.2 million Jews were forced to take. They never came out alive. We walked in free ... and walked out free, physically untouched, still breathing ...

Birkenau

Birkenau has a very different feel to the other Auschwitz site. There are no coffee shops or bookshops, no cabinet displays and no renovation work. This was the largest death camp in the world - the largest cemetery in the world - and I can't even describe its size. You could spend several days wandering around this camp and still not see it all.

Inside, the men's barracks are on the right, women's barracks on the left, separated by the train track and barbed wire.

There was a stillness in the air.

I barely spoke during my time there.

I had no words.

This is the men's quarantine hut of the camp, with latrines at the end.

Thousands of men, sitting back to back to each other, being told they have just two minutes 'to go'. Each one propping up the man beside them and behind them, willing them not to die. This would be after several days spent in a cattle truck with no sanitation, diarrhoea and dysentry rife among the prisoners. Shut your eyes and just imagine ... compare this with our modern sterile lives.

A group of Jews were told to clean out the latrines with their hats. When they left the quarantine hut, they were told to put their hats back on their heads. Not one of those Jews survived Auschwitz.

If a woman was pregnant in Birkenau, this was a death sentence. Google the story of Gisella Perl, a Jewish gynaecologist deported to Auschwitz. She saved the lives of thousands of Jewish pregnant women, but in order to save the mothers she had to suffocate their newborns - 'a life for a life'. If she hadn't, both the mother and baby would have been murdered. After the war, she opened up a practice in New York. Many of her clients were women from Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, women she had saved, women who wanted her to deliver their new baby, born into freedom - this time saving their baby's life, not taking it. Read the phrase 'a life for a life' - and try not to cry.

Here are the bunks where the men slept (top bunk, middle bunk, lower bunk), crowded together, no sanitation, covered in fleas and lice and with rats around their feet. As mentioned, diarrhoea and dysentery were rife within the camp. Which would you choose - top, middle or bottom?

Standing by the cattle truck, where it was decided who lived and who died, we heard the story of two parents arguing over who was going to hold the baby once they were separated to go left or right. The SS officer took the baby from the mother's arms, ripped the baby apart and then handed half back to the mother and half back to the father. Sorry to share this story - it makes me feel sick and tearful too - but these stories need to be shared.

We touched the barbed wire, thinking of what it means to be free.

Finally, as daylight faded, we reached the back of Auschwitz and stood by the ruins of the crematorium and said prayers and read poems.

And then we walked back out again - free.

This is the end of Day 3 and the end of the Poland trip. But this life experience won't stop there. It has changed me in a way I can't describe. This has been an emotional rollercoaster and has put life in perspective, especially as a Jew growing up in the UK.

When I arrived home from Stansted airport at 12.30 am, I peered into the bedroom of my youngest teenager. He was fast asleep. I stood there watching him for a while, thinking how fortunate my husband and I are - that our great grandparents were already here.

I've shared my words. I've shared my thoughts. Yet there's still so much more I can say. We have been 'warned' that our emotions will continue to play havoc with our minds over the coming days, weeks and even months.

We must remember.

We must pass on the stories - the horrific stories - to our children and grandchildren.

We must never forget.