A group of Cambridgeshire schoolchildren visited the Nazi death camps in Auschwitz to learn from the past. RAYMOND BROWN joined them.
THE girl who wore the white snakeskin shoe stole my heart in Auschwitz. It rests on thousands of brown shoes in one of the blocks of this colossal death camp.
I imagine a glamorous woman wearing the pair, sipping coffee in a café in Vienna – one of the many European cities that fed Auschwitz-Birkenau with victims.
She is arrested by the SS and herded on to a cattle carriage on its way to Auschwitz – the last stop.
Maybe it’s because my wife, Lisa, would wear shoes like them, which would be fashionable today. Maybe it’s because my wife’s grandfather was a political prisoner in Dachau concentration camp and Lisa lived in Vienna as a teenager.
Or maybe it’s because I’m clinging on to the small hope she may have survived.
I’m captivated with the thought of her as we walk through the gas chambers and along the railway tracks that carried more than a million people to their deaths.
I hope at the end of this journey I might find her among the family portraits brought here by the victims at the last stop before we leave.
Snow falls as we land at Krakow airport. Our first stop is the town of Oswiecim – which the Nazis Germanised to Auschwitz.
A few kilometres away, an estimated 1.3 million people were murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War.
Under the shadow of a bank of communist-built housing blocks is the town’s Jewish cemetery. It was flattened by the Nazis but residents rebuilt it in memory of the Jewish community who lived in the town.
I ask our Polish guide, Isabella Sliwinska, how the residents live with a former death camp on their doorstep.
“It is very difficult,” she says. “When they go abroad they don’t want to tell people they live in Auschwitz. The two communities lived in harmony together.
“People in the town were part of the resistance and the underground groups made contact with Jews in the camp to help them.
“They want the camp to remain as a lasting memorial.”
It feels surreal to walk through the town as people go about their daily business. Every year it receives 250,000 visitors, who see the source of the horror of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Boarding the coaches to drive to Auschwitz 1, the chatting pupils from Comberton Village College, Ely College, Friend’s School, Saffron Walden, Kimbolton Senior School, Stephen Perse Sixth Form College, St Mary’s School and The Perse School, are now silent.
They are here because of the Holocaust Educational Trust whose mission is to keep the memory of this tragedy alive.
We walk into the camp under the cold iron Arbeit Macht Frei (‘work makes you free’) motto on the gate.
On our right is where prisoners arrived to the sound of an orchestra. Just yards along the path stands the ‘death wall’ where prisoners were shot.
Did she hear the music as she walked through mud in her city shoes?
We enter a series of buildings where prisoners were kept in abject conditions. They are now filled with material carefully gathered by the Soviets who liberated the camp in January 1945.
The shock of the first room shows in the eyes of the students staring at stacks of old shoes. Among that pile is her smart shoe – like a speck of snow on a dark mountain.
The horror of what happened is driven home like a thump to the heart in the next room, where hair hacked off women by Nazis is piled up. I feel sick at the thought of her hair being among the stack.
The next room is crammed with battered suitcases. The names and birth dates of their owners are painted on them – many belonged to children.
It’s the little details that seem to hit hardest in trying to understand the scale of this systematic mass murder.
There’s a copper pipe on a wall next to a basement cell door in the penal block where suspected resisters were tortured.
I imagine an SS guard leaning his hand on and screaming at the prisoner. Fear hangs on the walls of this place.
“This is harrowing,” says Will Lloyd-Regan, 18, a student at Comberton Village College. “You see the statistics and the photographs but seeing it like this is upsetting. It just shows how important racial tolerance is so that something like this never happens again.”
We are in the gas chamber not destroyed by the Nazis. Cyanide was released in false shower fittings in the roof.
Still trying to take in the horrors of Auschwitz 1, we walk across the 420 acres of Auschwitz-Birkenau, with its massive gas chambers, where the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ was played out on an industrial scale.
Barracks cover the blighted landscape where anything up to 90,000 prisoners lived at any one time. I imagine the sea of humanity and of her stepping off that train, her shoes sinking into the snow.
“Was she ‘selected’ for the gas chamber or was she used as slave labour to survive another day?
As the sun sets we are shown the wooden barracks where hundreds of prisoners were kept in filthy conditions.
Walking along the tracks past the blown-up gas chambers and crematoria, I talk to a sombre Robert Halfon, the MP for Harlow.
Standing at the end of the tracks, he says: “My family were in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp so it’s like a reverse pilgrimage for me to understand what this horror was like for the people who were sent to this hell on earth.”
We arrive in the building the prisoners called ‘Canada’ – a land of plenty – it was where they were ordered to pick through the victims’ valuables.
We are taken through this ‘warehouse’, where prisoners were de-loused and stripped of their belongings to be sold to fuel the Nazi war machine.
In the last room is a wall covered with hundreds of photographs, brought here by the victims in their luggage.
I search for her among the family portraits but there are just too many. I want to believe one photograph could be her and that she may have survived.
We move out for a closing ceremony to mark our visit. There are 210 of us huddled in the cold.
We have brought candles to light in memory of the victims, and in the silence of the snow a light shines on an open gate.
Maybe she walked to freedom through it. I light a candle and place it next to the gate.