Lessons from my visit to Auschwitz

On Tuesday 13^th November I was privileged to participate in the Holocaust Education Trust ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’ project. Approximately 160 students from the South East of England and the excellent Holocaust Education Trust educators met at Gatwick Airport at 5am for an educational visit to Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenhau. Peter Kyle MP and I were guests on the visit.

I don’t have the words to convey the brutality of the Holocaust, or how being in a death camp where up to 1.5 million people – most of them Jewish - felt that day. The physicality of the camp – the electric fences, watch towers, sleeping spaces, latrines and the sheer size and scale - was chilling.

Trying to comprehend the planning behind this darkest period of history – recent history - was overwhelming. Overwhelming that such hatred existed that could lead to this industrial scale murder. The murder of 6 million people – mostly Jewish, but also gay people, disabled people and Roma communities.

Time and again throughout the visit we came face to face with the brutal realities of the Holocaust: reminded that it was done by humans, not monsters, to individual humans with ordinary lives and everyday hopes and dreams. Reminded that if it could happen once – less than a century ago, we must not kid ourselves that it could not happen again.

Whenever I read or learn about the Holocaust I find it difficult to compute 6 million people being brutally murdered in this way. That still remains true. It is difficult to compute that 6 million mostly Jewish people were murdered in the Holocaust. But with the experience of connecting to the humanity of individuals it is easier to comprehend and connect with the scale of the tragedy, its social and emotional impact and the deep trauma that must remain within individual survivors, families and communities.

The regime was dehumanising and the Nazi’s ultimate end was murder - immediately on arrival or through malnutrition and exhaustion – and yet the record keeping of individuals was meticulous. There were so many moments throughout the visit that winded me: seeing young Jewish visitors looking for the names of family members in the records; looking at the rows and rows of photos of women with hollowed faces and lifeless eyes; seeing 80,000 pairs of shoes from people murdered just in the last few days before liberation and more than a tonne of human hair; walking through the sauna where people's identity was stripped from them and they became a number; the sheer terror in the eyes of children. Then the gallery of family portraits and photographs reminding us again of their lives before the death camps: the happiness, the hopes and the dreams.   

And of course, the moment I stood in front of the dirty uniform with a pink triangle I came face to face with the reality that as a gay man had I been born at a different time in a different place I too could have been sent to one of the Nazi death camps.

Towards the end of the visit there was a service. We sat in the darkness at the end of the railway line right where the two Gas Chambers had been. Students read messages, poetry and passages which victims had buried in the hope they would one day be discovered. During the service the Rabbi accompanying us on the visit reminded us that antisemitism remains, that remembrance is important, that silence is never an option and that love and compassion are the only antidote to hatred.

Then he sang a Prayer in Hebrew. There, metres away from where the gas chambers had stood, where the Nazis had murdered up to 1.5 million people he sang a Prayer. Doing so in that specific location in the dark and cold was a moving experience. Tears rolled furiously down my cheeks and most of those around me as we processed the experience, feeling the anger, hurt and incomprehension.

My visit to Auschwitz in November 2018 was located at a particular time in history. The Community Security Trust reports increasing anti-Semitic hate crime. As a Stonewall trustee I bear witness to the intensified hatred and violence directed at trans communities in recent months. In short, the world feels more unstable and more divided than I have experienced in my 44 years

And only we can change this. Each individual one of us. I took this message from the Rabbi: never underestimate how loud silence is and never let silence speak out when you should. All of us must stand up against antisemitism, speak out against hate and never let silence speak for us.

I am grateful the Holocaust Education Trust for the opportunity to participate in this visit and for all their work. The visit was organised brilliantly - thank you to the staff who made it happen. Having experienced the visit for myself and seen the impact on these students it is crucial we support the Holocaust Education Trust’s work to educate future generations, some of whom may know very little about it, or who might believe the Holocaust is a thing of history even when we are seeing rising antisemitism in the UK and across Europe.