No words

I was in Poland last week, doing the tourist thing in Krakow and Warsaw. I leanred some new words that I can't spell, and saw more tourists than I care to contemplate. I know, I was one of them, but I always find it frustrating the sheer number of people who go to places just for the sake of 'seeing' them, but never really see them. There are so many who could be anywhere in the world for all the interaction they have with local culture and people. I admit, I was a little like most of them. There were times when, travelling alone in a country where I don't speak the language and wasn't sure of where else to go, I made the unforgivable decision to go to MacDonalds. Once there, I had to force myself to order something that isn't on the menu at home. The comfort of finding myself somewhere familiar was enough in itself, however, and I found a lot of the time it was easier to simply skip meals. Perhaps that's why travel is good for the soul; it certainly isn't good for the body, one way or another.

One of the experiences that is part of the tourist circuit of Krakow has no right to be there. It isn't beautiful, although it is peaceful. It isn't part of the Polish cultural experience, although it was partly built by Poles and certainly had a huge influence on the development of the country in many ways. A couple of hours by car from the city, thousands upon thousands of tourists and school children head there every week to be shown around by guides. There are few who go there without being touched in some way. It wasn't something that the Polish chose to be a part of their country, and I'm certain that plenty of them would like to disassociate themselves. Yes, one of the must-see-sites of Krakow is the Auschwitz concentration camp. Or, more properly, complex of camps, since the horror was spread over a vast area.

It has been said many times that it is hard to understand man's inhumanity to man. I couldn't say what made this site special in any other context. It was next to a perfectly ordinary town, in ordinary countryside. Now, with trees and grass growing across the area and in the remains of the gas chambers, still in the state of semi-collapse they were reduced to when the retreating Germans blew them up, there is a certain peace about the area that is to be found in many parts of the countryside across the world. So how is it that an estimated 1.5 million people died there in the most horrendous ways imaginable? How oculd people let that go on? And, more than 60 years later, why do people like me go there and find themselves teetering on the brink of tears in an emotionally draining experience, perhaps all the more incongruous for the sheer weight of numbers moving through the museums in a constant back log of human traffic?

Make no mistake. Holocaust deniers can pretend all they want that it is a conspiracy, but this is a real place. The hundreds of pairs of shoes found there are real. So are the mass graves, and the water storage areas still coloured a murky grey by the ashes of the hundreds of thousands who were incinerated. The Communists originally opened the site to the public as a warning against Nazism and the horrors which they inflicted, hidden across the countryside of Europe. There can be no doubting the enormous tonnage of human hair that was found by the Russians who liberated the camp as it waited to be turned into a textile used for, among other things, the lining of Germann uniforms. The photos of the disappeared, in particular the children moved many over the edge and into tears. Some teenage boys boasted that it didn't affect them, but the very fact that they felt they had to boast says enough, in my opinion.

So why visit the location of one of the worst acts of genocide in recent European history? Is it to understand what happened, and to try and avoid it happening again? There are many schools of thought that would argue no, that while the emotionally fraught experience hits people for a time, it doesn't stop them following orders and treating people inhumanely almost as soon as they leave. Is it to try and convince themselves, like some tourists tried to argue, that it wasn nothing to do with their own country, that there was nothing the allies could have done to stop what they had to have known was going on? The arguments ring hollow, even knowing that the Germans did everything they could to hide what they have to have known was a hideous blight on the landscape of civilisation. So why, why go? For some, certainly, it is simply to say that they have been there, seen it. But for the others? It is a little of everything. Because, for all that we can never understand how people could do this to each other - or hope we couldn't - the people who did this were, often, just like us. They were ordinary people who turned a blind eye, who believed what they were told. There are no museums that capture the apathy of so many people that allowed the horror to take place. There are no words to explain the feeling of guilt that washes over people like myself, who weren't born until decades later, with the question of whether we could stand up and resist the pressure of a tide of hatred, especially if it wasn't turned on us but on our neighbours. If we're honest with ourselves, most of us know that answer as we stand outside the building used by Josef Mengele for his horrendous experiments, and we know that it isn't the defiance we wish it was. That's why people should be visiting Auschwitz, to make them aware that it oculd easily happen again, and to recognise the signs in our own society that it is possible.