Holocaust Remembrance Day: Why we must never forget the horrors of Auschwitz

Auschwitz was liberated 80 years ago on this day, January 27, 1945: read my account of when I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau

On a gunmetal grey, bitterly cold windless morning, your taxi driver deposits you in the midst of a pine wood.

In an era of instant notifications, there is a distinct lack of signage. You look for guidance in your haunting surroundings.

Ahead are bleak brick barracks.

A metal sign hangs in front of you. It bears a three word sentence, surely the most horrific edict in human history.

Arbeit macht frei.

Work sets you free.

……

How do you describe pure evil?

A state of complete and utter wickedness.

Where hate aligns with deeply malicious ideology, fuelled by reprehensible rhetoric and a relentlessly bloodthirsty will to kill without remorse.

The Holocaust, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, are pure evil.

………

While you may only be a matter of miles from civilisation, standing in this dank corner of south-west Poland, you are a world away from life, as you stare incomprehensibly at the gates of hades.

Where the souls of more than 1,000,000 people exist in a tortured afterlife, imperative that their brutal stories remain implacably in the present, in order for the future to understand the dreadful past.

Here in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

You notice barbed-wire and machine gun posts and a single-line rail track. Here in this monstrously gruesome place situated amid a Polish forest.

There are many things that strike you deeply, here in this desolate site, as bile rises into the back of your throat, and a bizarre queasiness settles over you, while you ponder the fact that you are in a place where Zyklon B was first tested, then used in prodigious quantities to kill Jewish people.

You walk silently to a huddle of draughty barracks.

Where heaps of faded leather shoes of dead children, murdered children to be precise, have been stacked high in silent piles. Where I file past in baffled quietude, staring incomprehensibly at these testaments to short lives cut brutally short. Hideous relics of a hideous regime.

It is a sight that has never left me.

You ponder the pure evil that led to nearly 250,000 children perishing here, amid the fact - and it is a fact - that more than 6,000,0000 Jewish people were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust that took place during the Second World War, including more than 1,000,000 here in this place you have visited, in a killing zone smaller than London’s Hyde Park.

Another memory remains vivid.

I head to an area where lives were snatched away in unprepossessing brick buildings, impersonal, ramshackle rooms, amid such unimaginable fear and pain.

Also called gas chambers.

Despite already feeling nauseous, amid the dreadful banalities detailed during the administration, and execution, of genocide, I step gingerly into the gas chambers.

Exact replicas of the originals that had been torn down after this concentration camp had been liberated. Freed on this very day 80 years ago today, January 27. 1945.

For how could I not?

School trips come and go into this killing zone, some with wide-eyed teenagers, some needlessly boisterous, which in itself is disturbing.

After a while, time blurs, as you contemplate such horror in your own silence.

As I stand in these otherwise unremarkable buildings called gas chambers, amid the dreadful knowledge of the pure evil of the Holocaust that beggars belief and defies imagination - which comes from facts that everyone should know - I feel the urge to head back outside.

I require fresh air, away from these murderously claustrophobic killing areas, that begin, crucially, when you start with the demonisation, then the dehumanisation of an entire people - leaving Auschwitz to become the end point of pure evil. Not the beginning.

I stumble outside, feeling uneasy. First I crouch, then I drop down, onto the grass.

Unable to quell the urge to be physically sick, I retch.

Shortly afterwards, composure restored, I use the freedom denied to the murdered millions here, and walk out of this place of pure evil.

…….……….

“Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

Elie Wiesel

Holocaust survivor