A few minutes on the computer revealed that I was right about the cost of flights and the hotel was only about the same cost per night. With Lisa’s agreement, I booked flights for the next day and three nights in the hotel; this was about as far as our budget would stretch.
‘What are you going to do about that solicitor’s letter Ian?’
‘It can wait until we get back, Ainsworth and Cumming will still be there.’
Lisa frowned, ‘I know that name from somewhere, but I can’t quite recall where. Never mind, it’ll come back to me.’
The rest of the afternoon involved packing and finding somewhere that could supply us with Polish zloty at short notice. Mid-morning the next day saw our arrival at Luton Airport. With both of us having no more than a small holdall, which could be carried as hand luggage, check-in was a quick and perfunctory affair. We passed through security and passport control without undue difficulty. The garish orange aircraft took off on time and just over two hours later we disembarked at Krakow airport. With no need to wait for suitcases to be unloaded and we were rapidly processed through passport and customs checks and found ourselves outside the terminal.
‘That was a lot easier than the first time I came.’ I commented. ‘That was in 2001, not too long after the fall of communism. It was all stern faced officialdom and lack of facilities then.’
‘Sounds like fun. Thank God for the EU. How do we get into town? Bus or taxi?’
We opted for a taxi, which twenty minutes later dropped us outside our hotel. The hotel stood at the foot of the Wawel hill, with the huge castle that was the home of sixteenth century Polish kings. The steep hill was topped with massive ramparts, over which the three ornate towers of the Wawel cathedral peeked. Opposite the hill was our hotel, a three story Art Nouveau building, with an impressive frontage complete with Romanesque columns and pediment. We checked in and went up to our rooms. After a quick wash, we went out in search of a meal. We wandered through the grid pattern streets to the main square, a huge plaza fronted by impressive eighteenth century buildings, surrounding the Sukiennice, the cloth hall in the centre. The evening sun gave the brightly coloured buildings a magical quality. Lisa was entranced.
‘This place is awesome.’ Lisa exclaimed.
‘Yeah, it’s sort of like York meets Bavaria or Austria.’
We ate in one of the restaurants in the Sukiennice, sitting outside at a table in the still warm sunshine. It was expensive but worth it.
‘Can we explore a bit?’ Lisa asked.
‘You don’t have to ask me, I’m not your father. If you want to explore go ahead.’
Lisa whooped with delight as she discovered the stalls lining the inside of the Sukiennice. She flitted from stall to stall, looking at the inexpensive amber jewellery, the crystal and the collection of tourist trinkets. It was then I realised how young she really was, we had been working side by side as equals and in terms of the support she had given me, she was an adult, but here I saw that the girl that I knew from school was still there. I trekked indulgently behind her as she brought matching silver and amber earrings and necklace for herself and presents for James, her parents and siblings. At last she was all shopped out and we made our way down the hill, past the baroque cathedral to our hotel. I was weary from the travelling, but the shopping expedition had reinvigorated Lisa.
‘Come on, let’s go into the bar for a drink.’ She led the way into the long room that was reminiscent if a German bierkeller, with drinking mottoes painted on the vaulted walls. Lisa ordered a beer and despite the medication, I joined her. Lisa wiped the foam off her top lip with her fingertip and daintily licked it off, ‘Where is the archive?’
‘It’s appropriately enough in Kazimierz, the other side of that main road. It was the Jewish Quarter before the war. A guide pointed it out to me on one of my school trips here. We’ll head down there tomorrow morning.’
‘Cool.’
We finished off our drinks and retired for the night.
Chapter 15
I slept deeply, helped by the beer until five in the morning, when the first tram rumbled along the main road under my window like a mobile earthquake. After that I dozed, woken intermittently by the passing trams. I cursed myself for forgetting the trams and not requesting a room on the town side of the hotel away from the noise. At seven I gave up trying to sleep and showered, shaved and dressed. At eight I rang Lisa’s room.
‘Hiya,’ she greeted me enthusiastically. ‘You ready for breakfast? I’ve been awake for ages. I don’t know why, but I woke up quite early this morning.’
‘It’s the bloody trams’ I grumbled ‘they start at five. It’s like trying to sleep through an earthquake after that.’ Lisa laughed.
‘Now you sound like my Dad, he’s always grumpy if he doesn’t get a full night’s sleep.’
‘Gee thanks!’
She laughed again. ‘Come on let’s get breakfast.’
I met her in the corridor outside our rooms and we made our way down to the bar we had drunk in the previous night that doubled as a dining room. Breakfast was an all-you-can-eat buffet and we both wolfed our food down hungrily. Leaving the hotel, we crossed the main road and walked the half mile into Kazimierz, passing through the central square with its ritual bath house and two synagogues.
‘How big was the Jewish population?’ Lisa asked. ‘This place is huge.’
‘At the start of the war there were around 70,000 Jews in Krakow’
‘How many survived?’
‘At the end of the war about 10,000 returned here. It’s reckoned that there are only about one hundred Jews here today and most of those aren’t practising.’
‘Auschwitz?’
‘No, most died at an extermination camp just outside town called Plaszow, just the other side of the river. Haven’t you seen Schindler’s List?’
‘The film? That was here?’
‘Yes, Schindler’s factory is about a mile away, it’s a museum now.’
Following the map, we crossed into a side street and followed the road past yet another synagogue to the Holocaust Archive. The heavy wooden door was firmly locked, it was closed. I peered at the sign on the wall outside and consulted my phrasebook.
‘I think it says closed. It seems to be open four days a week; today isn’t one of them. If I’ve got it right they’re open at 9.00 tomorrow morning. It looks like we’ve got the day off. What would you like to do?’
‘Well….It doesn’t feel right to be this near to Auschwitz and not to visit it, to sort of pay our respects. I know you’ve been loads of times, but would you take me?’
‘No problem, if you’re sure, it’s a pretty grim place. I can’t think of anywhere that is more upsetting’ I said, adding to myself ’Unless you count my home.’
‘I’d really like to go and it’s where Miller was based for two years, so it is relevant….sort of.’
‘Come on then.’
We made our way back to the hotel where a helpful receptionist arranged for us to join a coach party setting off for Oswiecim. We sat together on the coach, watching the Polish countryside pass by.
‘It’s amazing how many of these houses look Austrian.’
‘Yeah, presumably this part of Poland was once part of the Austrian Empire.’
The rural air to the countryside was marred by occasional coal mines that stood out like black scars on the landscape. Forty minutes later we disembarked outside the former concentration camp. We joined a party with an English speaking guide and passed beneath the famous iron gateway with the motto ‘Arbeit macht frei’ picked out in metal letters above it. We entered the camp, past the double rows of rusty barbed wire suspended from electrical insulators on the concrete posts. The camp itself consisted of a series of brick built two storey barracks on each side of a wide tree lined boulevard. The guide ushered us into one of the buildings that housed a museum containing the evidence of the holocaust. She recounted how the Jews were transported to Birkenau and selected for slave
labour or immediate extermination in the gas chambers. When confronted with the glass container about the size of a water cooler bottle that contained the ashes that were all that remained of over one million people, Lisa just stood there in stunned silence, lost in her own thoughts. We made our way through gruesome exhibits, one after another; large display cases of artificial limbs from the victims, shoes, hair brushes and suitcases. We followed the guide up to the first floor and my stomach gave a sickening lurch as I remembered that this was the place where they had on display part of the seven thousand kilos of hair cut from the victims. As we reached the landing outside, Lisa looked into the room and gave a sob; tears filled her eyes and began to trickle down her cheeks. I put my arm round her to comfort her. She made a second attempt to enter the room, but try as she might, she could not get herself across the threshold.
‘How could they do that?’ she sobbed.
‘It’s worse, you can’t see the cloth they made from the hair from here, that’s got to be one of the most obscene things I’ve ever seen.’
‘How do you manage to come back here every year with the Sixth form?’
‘Because there’s no better way to teach the Holocaust: you can understand it intellectually in the classroom, but when you come here, you understand it emotionally, you feel it, you start to see the Holocaust in terms of individuals rather than simply numbers. You’re not the first person I’ve seen have problems with that room.’
We followed the guide into a room displaying children’s’ clothes, this was my Achilles heel. I looked at the display case, covered with rose petals left by visitors. Inside I could see the clothes of a baby. It got to me every time, the small shoes. I could see Lucy and Rob when they wore small shoes like that and tears welled up in my eyes. What pathetic excuse for a human being could throw a small child into a gas chamber? I knew the answer, William Howard Miller. Fortunately, Lisa was watching and listening to the guide and I was able to retreat to a corner and mop my eyes before she noticed my moment of weakness. We carried on, exhibit after exhibit, testimony to how low humanity could sink; until we were both emotionally numb by the time we reached the first gas chamber where Russian prisoners were gassed with Zyklon B gas as an experiment to find a more efficient way of mass murder. Lisa had once more sought the comfort of my arm and hugged me close, as if my presence could protect her from the horrors she was seeing.
‘I never realised how bad this place was Ian. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked you to bring me her after all the emotional turmoil you’ve been through. I saw your reaction earlier; it was unfair of me to get you to come here.’
‘I hoped you hadn’t noticed, but don’t worry, just for once my unmanliness had nothing to do with my marriage; the kids’ clothing always hits me. It’s a parent thing. Not your fault.’
At the end of the tour, the guide gave us a few minutes to look in the bookshop before we headed off for Birkenau, some five to ten minutes away. She approached us.
‘Your daughter is very affected by what she has seen here.’ I did not disabuse her of her assumption.
‘It’s a very emotive place. How do you do this every day, I find it difficult bringing a group here annually, I can’t imagine what it must be like to come to work here every day. How do you manage it?’
‘It gets easier with time, but no-one can come here and not be affected. Why do I do it? Because someone has to, someone must tell people what happened here.’
I understood, but I still didn’t think I could do it. We boarded the coach once more and took the short journey to Auschwitz II, Birkenau. The guide got us off the coach and led us along the railway track, through the famous gatehouse. We followed the track to the disembarkation platform, where sixty five years earlier, the SS selected who was to live and who was to die. The guide was going through a description of the selection process, when a board with pictures of the camp from 1943 caught our attention. There were pictures of the selection, the lines of prisoners making their way into the women’s camp or the men’s camp, or worse still for a ‘shower’. Another picture caught Lisa’s attention.
‘Look!’ she hissed. I looked; it was a picture of four SS officers standing in the camp smoking.
‘What?’
‘Look closely’
I scrutinised the photograph. The text said underneath ‘.Left to right: Dr. Josef Mengele, Commandant Rudolf Höss, Josef Kramer, Commandant of Bergen-Belsen, and an unidentified officer.’
‘Don’t you see? The unidentified officer is Miller.’ I looked closely, she was right, concrete proof that Miller had been here. I focused my camera and took a photograph of the picture to have a record of our discovery.
The guide had already moved off and we hurried to catch her up. She had led the group into the women’s camp, with its brick built barracks. We entered one of the buildings and saw the three levels of brick built shelves that served as bunks for at least nine people. Even in summer the wind blew across the plain and cut like a knife. The barracks was dark and draughty, Lisa shivered in the gloom and I put my arm round her again.
‘If it’s like this in summer, what was it like in winter, wearing only those thin striped uniforms?’ she asked.
‘Bloody cold! The kids I brought here came in February and March and I was freezing despite wearing a thick army parka.’
We followed the guide out of the barracks, feeling like a child in a crocodile line on a primary school visit. The next building was a toilet block with limited washing facilities and a long concrete topped bench with back-to-back lines of round holes running along it.
‘The inmates were tattooed with a number on their right arms, Auschwitz was unique in that, once done, it was a breach of discipline to use someone’s name; only people had names, the inmates were subhuman, animals. Emptying these latrines, the Scheissekommando, was considered to be a prized job, because the guards did not come in here because of the smell and fear of disease. The work party could work without supervision and be people, rather than animals.’
‘Scheissekommando?’ Lisa asked. ‘Doesn’t that mean…..’ I nodded.
‘Shit squad. The only time in this vile place you could be a human being was when you were up to your thighs shovelling shit.’
The guide shepherded the group out of the building and back to the railway line. We followed behind the group.
‘Why the tattoos and all of this hassle? Lisa asked.
‘The process dehumanised the inmates, breaking them mentally, just as the poor diet and low calorific intake allied to hard manual labour broke them physically. They were less likely to cause trouble or resist.’
‘And Miller was involved in all of this. What a heartless bastard!’
‘Not sure exactly what his role was, that’s why we’re here isn’t it? There were jobs that didn’t involve any contact with the inmates, administration and so on.’
‘He was still part of the system, either way. I’m getting to hate him. The more we find out about him, the more loathsome he seems to become.’
The guide was pointing out the area where the store rooms containing the possessions of the murdered Jews had been. These had been known to the inmates as Kanada, the land of plenty. Then it was down to the ruins of the gas chambers and the crematoria. Ahead of us a party of uniformed Israeli soldiers stood clustered round a rabbi outside the crematorium, heads hung in mourning.
‘It’s strange,’ Lisa whispered ‘I feel as if I want to apologise to them for what happened here. I wasn’t born and it wasn’t my country that did it, but I still want to tell them I’m sorry.’
‘Our fathers’ generation, or grandfathers’ in your case, have much to answer for; they knew what was happening here and did nothing to stop it. Burke got it right, all that is necessary for evil to triumph, is that good men do nothing.’
We stood along the side of a rectangular pool of muddy water next to the gas chamber and crematorium ruins, as the guide recited how even the ashes from the crematoria were disposed of
the these pools and flushed into the river. Lisa hung her head, then caught sight of the white flecked earth underfoot.
‘Is that chalk in the soil?’
‘I’m afraid not, that’s burned bone from the crematorium.’ Lisa stepped back hurriedly, her pretty face drained of its’ colour.
‘Can we get away from here?’
I put my arm round her, as she led us over the cobblestones towards the monument that stood at the back of the camp. There twenty grey granite slabs inscribed in every major European language were placed in the ground. We walked along until we found the one in English. In a low voice Lisa read the inscription aloud.
'For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children, mainly Jews from various countries of Europe. Auschwitz-Birkenau 1940 - 1945'
For a few minutes we stood in silence with our heads bowed, then turned and began to make our way back along the railway track towards the gatehouse. Ahead of us our party had separated into small groups, walking in silence heads bowed, isolated in their own thoughts. Lisa and I walked together; I felt her hand slip into mine, looking for some human contact and reassurance, as she struggled to come to terms with what she had seen. Once through the gateway, we boarded the coach that set off for Krakow. Lisa turned in her seat to face me.
‘That was the worst place I have ever been.’
‘I did warn you, it’s a monstrous place. You can’t go there and remain unaffected, not if you’ve got any humanity.’
‘It’s strange; I found the first camp worse than the second, despite the horrible things that happened there.’
‘Yes, I know, I think it’s because by the time you get to Auschwitz II, you’re emotionally bankrupt, there’s nothing left, you just feel numb. It sinks in later. The first time I went there, I was so emotionally traumatised that it took a week for everything to sink in, and then it hit me like a train. It’s better that you get upset while you are there, it sort of gets it out of your system.’
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