I recently visited Poland with a group of Christians from around the UK. The purpose was to engage with aspects of Jewish history in Krakow by learning more about the experience of the Jewish community during the Holocaust, and by visiting Auschwitz.
We toured Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarters, where we sat in the Remuh Synagogue, one of only two still active synagogues in the city. We visited Wavel Castle, where Nazi Governor General Hans Frank had his headquarters. We walked through the area of the city which was turned into the ghetto and from where tens of thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.
The former administrative building of Oscar Schindler’s factory now houses an excellent museum dedicated to the history of Krakow occupied by German Nazis. At the site of the former concentration camp of Plaszow, cabbage white butterflies flitted in and out of the branches of small oak trees. A few Jewish headstones, used by the Nazis to lay roads and the foundations of camp huts, are the only evidence of what this peaceful green landscape was once used for.
On the final day of our tour we visited Auschwitz. We walked round both camps in silence for most of the time, punctuated only by the narration of our guide. As we stood at the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gates, a church bell sounded twelve times.
It plodded out its daily duty, ringing clearly across from the nearby town, just as it must have done seventy five years ago as men and women walked through these gates, most never to leave.
It is impossible to put into words what it is like to walk round a death camp, feeling physically weighed down by the increasingly heavy knowledge of what took place on this very spot. It is also difficult to convey something of how much the experience of visiting Auschwitz is like nothing else. This is not simply a museum or a place of commemoration. This is a place where people were killed, not—as I have heard people suggest—because of one man’s hatred but because of the hate, indifference, and complicity of countless ordinary individuals.
Photograhps in this article: Rob Thompson