On Tuesday 2nd October Rev Len Collings, Principal Chaplain at St Mary’s College, Middlesbrough and two of the College’s students, Sarah Walkington and Francis Rowney, took part in the Holocaust Educational Trust to Auschwitz. Here Rev Len shares his thoughts on this traumatic experience.

From this

to this

just because they were different.

These two pictures perhaps sum up the experience of a day’s visit to the scene of the greatest act of man’s inhumanity to man – that is Auschwitz-Birkenau. The first shows an exhibition of pre war family life for Polish Jews, perfectly happy. The second, the gas chamber at Auschwitz I.

Second October 2007 will always be a unique day in my life – for the first time and thanks to the Holocaust Education Trust, I and two of my College’s students are visiting the concentration camps in Poland that are known as Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II – Birkenau. It was a day trip, twenty two hours travelling to and back from Poland, twenty two hours of constant activity and little time for anything else including food. A hard day? Well normally you would say yes, but the ‘suffering’ we had to endure on the day almost seems inadequate when we witness the real suffering and martyrdom two million people suffered at the hands of the Nazi SS in these seemingly God forsaken places. I say seemingly because now there is peace in these camps, apart from the thousands of visitors – especially in the vast expanse of Birkenau. But at what price has this peace been bought, can we with any justification stand as free people on the very site where innocent God-fearing people were conned into believing that they would be well looked after in their new home – for 80% of them it was a home they were never to see, their next place of rest was to be their eternal reward with God.

But how could this have happened, how could a nation which produced so many brilliant philosophical minds also be the author of the ‘Final Solution’ with all its inherent evil. The answer for us all to ponder on is – with no great difficulty. Of course many people carrying out these acts of atrocity will claim that they were only carrying out orders and were probably themselves under threat of death if they did not do so. But is this really a valid excuse – how many of us could say the same thing in our lives? Of course not in the same context but are we absolved from our responsibility because someone else has told us to do something we don’t agree with and to disobey may, for example, lose us our job. Better to stand up for what we believe than be complicit in some unacceptable action. Better perhaps to die a martyr’s death than do nothing.

But why the need for this mass extermination in the first place – how could human beings treat their fellow human beings in such an appalling way. The answer is even more chilling than the actions. My visit to Auschwitz enlightened me in many things but the most devastating fact to hit me was that they were able to perform such inhuman actions because they did not see their victims as humans – they were Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, not lower forms of life but disposable non-life, used if possible to aid the German war machine but when losing their use, either because they were too young, too old, infirm or whatever, they were disposed of, but not before retaining everything of potential use, including hair used for rug making, recycling of artificial limbs and melting down gold fillings.

At Auschwitz and Birkenau many things affect you in many different ways – at Auschwitz I it is the things you see – the piles of shoes, glasses, suitcases, babies clothes, but perhaps more poignantly at Birkenau it is the things you don’t see that really get to you. As we sat at the very end of the railway line which led nearly two million people to their deaths and listened to Rabbi Marcus singing the El Molei Rachamim – a Jewish lament – for all who died, in my mind’s eye I pictured those poor innocent people on the selection ramp just a few yards from us – I could see the men, women and especially the children – did they really know that in just a couple of hours they would be dead?

At the end of our closing commemoration, we lit candles and as a group we walked back down the track, pausing in silence to place our candles at various points, bringing light to this dark place. How many of those poor innocent victims would have loved to have made that walk. How guilty did we all feel that we were able to walk to our freedom from that place, but how certain were we all that a firm and conscious responsibility had been placed on us all that we must never allow these events to be forgotten and must continue to learn from them, we owe it to those people who could not walk away and in the emotional words of Rabbi Marcus, those who do not learn from history are likely to experience it again.

Yes our world is not perfect, far from it and atrocities continue to happen, are we learning, sometimes you wonder, but nothing must deter us from continuing to fight all forms of prejudice and discrimination for whatever reason. Our world could and should be a beautiful place, the wonderful creation of God if only we could learn that one simple lesson, that we are all made in the image of God, we are all equal in his eyes and should see everyone as equal through our own eyes.

These thoughts are my immediate response to the day, written within a day of returning; in a week, a month, a year from now, I will have different thoughts, different memories will reach my mind, but I will never forget my first visit to the death camps of Auschwitz, and I thank God and the Holocaust Education Trust for the opportunity. If for some reason you are reading these words and have not been, then please go see for yourself and together we can be the voice for those who cannot speak but would love to know why.

Rev Len Collings

Principal Chaplain, St Mary's College, Middlesbrough