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I remember as a schoolboy watching those dreadful newsreel pictures of the terrible scenes found by Allied troops when they liberated the Nazi concentration camps. Even now I feel very uncomfortable when some of those shots show up on television.
Yet, despite these feelings of revulsion, I’ve always wanted to visit the Auschwitz camp in Poland and, in my own quiet way, pay homage to the millions of people who were treated like vermin by what one assumes were at some point in their personal histories ‘ordinary’, normal people.
The death camps, their origins and their incomprehensible function are a mystery and, perhaps, just perhaps, a visit to Auschwitz might provide some answers. I don’t know, but the urge to visit the shrine is a strong one.
The camps were incomprehensible. And so too was the theft a few days ago of the sign above the main gate to Auschwitz, ‘Arbeit macht frei’. But, fortunately, the Polish police have recovered the sign and arrested five people in connection with its theft.
The sign, ‘Work makes free’, is unquestionably the symbol of Auschwitz and all that happened in that hellhole, and it is good that it is to be replaced where it has stood all these years.
Maybe one day I’ll get to see it for myself, but whether it and the museum that now lays behind it will give me any answers to the many questions I have remains to be seen.
.
I remember as a schoolboy watching those dreadful newsreel pictures of the terrible scenes found by Allied troops when they liberated the Nazi concentration camps. Even now I feel very uncomfortable when some of those shots show up on television.
Yet, despite these feelings of revulsion, I’ve always wanted to visit the Auschwitz camp in Poland and, in my own quiet way, pay homage to the millions of people who were treated like vermin by what one assumes were at some point in their personal histories ‘ordinary’, normal people.
The death camps, their origins and their incomprehensible function are a mystery and, perhaps, just perhaps, a visit to Auschwitz might provide some answers. I don’t know, but the urge to visit the shrine is a strong one.
The camps were incomprehensible. And so too was the theft a few days ago of the sign above the main gate to Auschwitz, ‘Arbeit macht frei’. But, fortunately, the Polish police have recovered the sign and arrested five people in connection with its theft.
The sign, ‘Work makes free’, is unquestionably the symbol of Auschwitz and all that happened in that hellhole, and it is good that it is to be replaced where it has stood all these years.
Maybe one day I’ll get to see it for myself, but whether it and the museum that now lays behind it will give me any answers to the many questions I have remains to be seen.
.
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