Auschwitz-Birkenau, the darkest stain on humanity?

Arriving in Kraków for a 4 day budget break yesterday, my real intentions were sated today when a 25 year plus ambition of seeing the Auschwitz death camps were met.

The darkest of dark tourism, perhaps.

Krakow itself is unbelievably beautiful and yet just 90 minutes away, close to the town of O?wi?cim, lies the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the scene of 1.1 million deaths during World War 2 and the Holocaust.

The experience begins at Auschwitz 1, itself, where tour guides (mine was a Spanish group as English tour groups were not available for any of the four days) equip you with receivers and headsets, before being ushered into a small cinema where a 10 minute film gives a brief explainer of the horrors of what you will see.

You are then taken around the concentration camp, under the famous gated entrance marked Arbeit Macht Frei (work sets you free), seeing the genocide of Nazi Germany and Rudolph Hoss.

The tour ends fittingly with the gallows where the Camp Commandment, Hoss, was publicly hanged in 1947, before a shuttle bus takes you to Birkenau, with its famous arched building and railway line.

Auschwitz 1 was numbing; what struck me was the sheer horror of what Nazi Germany carried out on 900,000 (mainly Hungarian) Jews from across Europe. The glassed exhibition cases showed prosthetic limbs, shorn hair, enamel cookware, suitcases, shoes and clothing. Photos of the murdered lined the corridors.

Basements and courtyards showed rooms of torture and executions, all carried out relentlessly and routinely, with the world largely ignorant of the atrocities there.

Birkenau was similarly distressing, with the living quarters of stalls of beds and the skeletal gas chambers and incinerators lying in vast rural space (destroyed by the SS before the Russian liberation on 27th January 1945).

The single railway line and camp entrance stands now as a permanent reminder of the evil wrought by nations.

Oddly, for someone so emotional usually, I didn't cry at either place. It left me feeling numb, as if I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. I knew, of course, of events there, but seeing the artefacts first hand, didn't create tears - just emptiness and sadness.

We'd all do well to remember all those who perished and ask why it was allowed to happen too. We all have a duty to speak out - to protect the vulnerable, the refugees, the asylum seekers, the displaced.

Because if it was you, who would speak up and out for you?

First They Came - Pastor Martin Niemoller

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me.