Trip tp Auschwitz-Birkenau

In 2016, we took part in the " Lesson for Auschwitz" project and attended several sessions to help us understand the the Holocaust. Which while being a very dark part of human history is also the stimulus for the area of study in to Social influence. the following is an article written by Alfie Oliver, a year 12 psychology student whom took part in the project.

What I learned from Auschwitz

Kitty Hart-Moxon was 16 years old when she first entered a Nazi death camp. She was 17 when she first stood in front of a Nazi firing squad with her mother, following an unsuccessful attempt to escape the camp. At the last moment before she was to be killed, her punishment was changed. She was to serve life imprisonment at Auschwitz Birkenau.

For the next two years Kitty would go through hard labour, experience life threatening illness and see atrocities that most of us could not even begin to imagine the horrors of. Her favourite job at the Nazi camp was cleaning the hole-in-the-ground toilets, because it meant she was able to use them whenever she wanted, a commodity most at the camp did not have. She worked 8 months near the extermination area of the camp, sorting the clothes and items stripped from the Jews who had been murdered in the gas chambers. She estimates that she saw more than half a million killed during this time.

Kitty Hart-Moxon was liberated, along with her mother, in April 1945 and is happily married with two children.

Kitty Hart-Moxon gives one courageous story out of th estimated 1.3 million who were imprisoned at Auschwitz during the Second World War. Tragically 1.1 million of these prisoners did not live to tell us what happened in that horrific death camp.

The aspect of Auschwitz that most shocked me was the sweeping size of it. Auschwitz Birkenau (the bigger of the Auschwitz camps) stretched as far in both directions as they eye could see, spreading out from the ominous central gate; 50m of unnerving barbed fencing followed by a guard tower, repeated and repeated until they faded from sight. Once I’d walked through the infamous gate tower it was a field of lone standing chimneys and ruined stone foundations where the huts used to be (the Nazis burnt down most of the huts in a desperate attempt to cover it up in 1945 when the war was lost). This was not a temporary set up war camp. This was built with the plan of it being a long standing extermination camp in a Nazi ruled Europe, built with brick and facilitated with a network of train lines connecting it to other major cities and camps in Europe.

We were then shown the inside of a hut used to house women. Women that entered Auschwitz with a young child were immediately executed along with their child – the Nazis could not afford the hassle of a grieving mother within the camp. For this reason many women hid their pregnancy if they came in carrying a child. These children were to grow up in the worst possible place imaginable so inside the women’s housing hut the mothers and other prisoners had made attempts to create some glimmer of delusional happiness into the desolate world their babies were to be brought up in. They made paintings on the walls in bright colours which drew the focus of the bunk away from the uneven stone floor and the shelf like beds they slept in. This was one of the hardest hitting areas of the camp.

We then made the long walk down the middle of the camp, from the train platform to the extermination chambers. The buildings had been demolished, but the downward stairs to the underground chamber still remained. In a way the fact it was demolished made it worse; the inside, where so many had perished, was exposed to us, and it made all the more real.

At the end of the day we stood at the memorial and listened to Rabbi Barry Marcus speak to us. He spoke about the lessons to learn and how we should remember what happened. After the speaking we all lit a candle a place it on the already covered memorial. It showed a sign of respect and the hundreds of lit candles looked quite spectacular in the dark of the evening.

Auschwitz is like no other place I’ve ever been. An expanse of bunkhouses and barbed wire fencing left relatively untouched for the last 71 years. The kept nature of the site allowed everyone to imagine exactly what horrors the prisoners had gone through.

We all experienced it in our own way, rather than reading what it’s like from a book, or seeing on a film. For that reason I’d urge you to visit, find what really impacts you, makes you stop and think.

Alfie Oliver.