A little Town Called Oswiecim

BTW, has anybody heard of a little Polish town called Oswiecim? It’s situated about an hour’s bus ride to the west of the beautiful southern Polish city of Krakow. Situated outside the town stands a Konzentrazionslager dating from World War II. I visited it fifteen years ago to pay my respects to the many slave laborers who died there, making a nice little profit for somebody.

When we arrived in Oswiecim, I attempted to ask some school students on their way home in my limited Polish the way there. They didn’t seem to want to know.

As we stood on the bus (we eventually worked out how to get there), I was initially startled by the way that life just seems to go on there as if nothing had happened.

We eventually arrived at the gate which has the words, “Arbeit Macht Frei” above it (Yes, I am talking about Auschwitz, or Auschwitz 1, as it is more correctly called, to distinguish it from the much larger Auschwitz 2 or Auschwitz-Birkenau further down the road. It is Auschwitz 2 that features in the film, Schindler's List, although the film crew were not in fact allowed to film inside the former KL.

We paid for a ticket to the camp and the cinema and watched the Soviet-made film of the liberation of the KL in 1944. Faces of the inmates grateful to have been liberated by Glorious Red Army. Twins who’d been experimented on. No mention of the word Jew, although the overwelmingly vast majority of people who died there were Jewish.

We walked past the gallows on which Hans Frank, the Commandant of Auschwitz, had been hanged after the war (I found it impossible to suppress a feeling of satisfaction at this), the gas chamber, a crematorium, and past brick barracks dedicated to each of the nationalities who'd perished there, one dedicated to the 20,000 Soviet citizens who'd perished in the Great Patriotic War, though few had in fact died in Auschwitz.

By chance, we came across the Museum of Martyrology, walked in by the exit and saw the exhibition dediated to the Holocaust in reverse order, beginning with the culmination of the holocaust and going on to its beginnings in pre-war Germany.

I went there expecting to emote. Instead, I was overcome with a feeling of anger. Anger at the

to be concluded