The world's saddest place

During our trip to Krakow, we visited Auschwitz 1 and 2, also known as Birkenau.

I can’t do this topic justice so I won’t try. Everything, which can be said, has been about the concentration camps of Germany, Poland, etc. There is no need to say any more. Plenty of information, should you want it, on www.wikipedia.org.

In my opinion, like I guess many others’, these camps are some of the saddest places on earth. The day, as you can see, was not the warmest – heaven knows what I must have felt like without the luxury of winter clothing, and for Krakow, this was not a freezing winter’s day. Credit due to the country of Poland for keeping the three camps in fairly good shape, for generations such as my own, to pay our respects to the slain and mutilated of the Hitler era. More importantly, for neither glorifying it by giving the “Experience” treatment, though tourism is inevitable. And for leaving them, as much as possible, in their bleak and mostly undisturbed state.

This is a photo I took from the watchtower overlooking the camp. The quality isn’t great, with reflections from the windows behind the camera, but the second part of the tour was rather rushed and, therefore, so were my pictures. It gives an idea of camp's scale - this was one quarter of the "accommodation" - the gas chambers were demolished two days before the Allies took over the camp and many of the buildings were demolished or have rotted.

Despite the necessary herding, I was more disturbed than I though I’d be, as were the rest of the coach. The journey back to Krakow was almost silent. That night, I contemplated on the atmosphere of the camps when everyone had gone home and the place remained bleak and silent. If you were a ghost-hunter, then surely this would be the ideal spot to detect the spirits of the painfully departed.

The word I think I'd describe my experience here is "awestruck", pure and simple. Here, in your face, is the evidence of death - not a death to a statistical body of people in a history book but real flesh and blood humans. In the main concentration camp, there were displays of belongings taken from the inmates as they arrived - hair, shoes, clothing. The dolls' clothes were somehow the most disturbing.

My great grandfather, Philip Jacobs, was a Jewish exile who moved to London in the 1920s, so I don’t think I can start to contemplate on what might have been if he’d stayed. You'd not be reading this, because I would undoubtedly not be here to write it.