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Reflections on visiting Auschwitz

5 June 2009

Mohammed Amin recently visited Auschwitz with five other members of the Muslim Jewish Forum of Greater Manchester. He shares his personal reflections here.

It was a beautiful sunny day in May, and in the trees the birds were singing. It felt so wrong. In this place, now a monument to the evil that man is capable of, I felt the sky should be dark with cold pouring rain or snow.

The shadow of the Holocaust has haunted my life. I grew up with images of the concentration camps on television. I was 10 when Adolf Eichmann was captured, tried and hanged, and about 16 when ITV showed "The Investigation" by Peter Weiss, a play consisting solely of readings from the testimonies of prisoners and camp guards from the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. The impact of their words is shown by the fact that I remember the play more than 40 years later. Also unforgettable is the speech Elie Wiesel made in 1995 at the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, from which I have copied a short extract:

In this place of darkness and malediction we can but stand in awe and remember its stateless, faceless and nameless victims. Close your eyes and look: endless nocturnal processions are converging here, and here it is always night. Here heaven and earth are on fire.

Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers, the prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children, Jewish children, a beautiful little girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tenderness has never left me. Look and listen as they quietly walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger.

• The experience of standing inside a gas chamber. It is even more chilling now as I remember it than it felt at the time.
  
• The enormous pile of human hair. After gassing their victims, the Germans harvested the hair by shaving the heads of the corpses before burning them, as the hair was woven into fabrics. There is a fabric sample on display in the museum.
  
• The sheer physical scale of the Birkenau camp, which covered many acres with wooden huts. It is made grimmer by the knowledge that the camp was only used to house those capable of work; children and the infirm were separated as they left the train cattle cars and gassed immediately.

The evil that was perpetrated at Auschwitz and the industrial scale of the Holocaust must never be forgotten. Holocaust denial is not limited to neo-Nazis, and is sometimes found amongst Muslims. Accordingly I was particularly pleased to learn about the French Muslim website on the Holocaust

I would encourage everyone to visit Auschwitz. Flying there takes you to Krakow airport. In compensation for the horrors of the death camp, the centre of Krakow and the surrounding countryside are both very beautiful and full of landmarks to visit.

This item was originally posted on the blogs section of the City Circle website.