Chancellor Gordon Brown wants to send children and teachers from every school in the UK to visit Auschwitz. But is what happened there too gruesome for young minds... or a necessary lesson in good - and evil?

By Lindy McDowell

19 November 2005
www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news

Auschwitz-Birkenau was among Hitler's mos torious death camps - and the museum which annually attracts millions of visitors from all over the world to this, the site of the most terrible mass murder in the history of humanity, undoubtedly plays a vital role in educating people about an era and a crime we should never forget. But should we encourage our children to visit such a place?

The Government certainly thinks so. In recent days Gordon Brown has announced a grant of L1.5m to the Holocaust Education Trust to enable two>>students from every school in the UK to visit Auschwitz.

At a time when surveys show that even a significant proportion of adults believe that Adolf Hitler was a fictional character, the need for people to be educated about the full rors of Nazism is obvious. Lord Greville Janner, the chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, says: "It is crucial that the youth of today know and remember the horrors of the past and do all in their power to join in the battle against racism."

That's a view echoed by Lisa Leopold and her husband, Leslie, who have organised three trips direct from Belfast to Auschwitz.

A number of young people have been on these but, understandably, Lisa says she is stunned - and not a little shocked - that despite sending out information to local secondary schools, where the Third Reich is part of the history curriculum, not one has been in touch to find out more.

Lisa decided to organise the first trip in 2004 after Belfast hosted the national Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony. She believes passionately that people must never forget the Nazi genocide and decided that this was something practical she could do. As a member of Northern Ireland's Jewish community she saw it, she says, as her own small mark of respect to the memory of the millions of men, women and children systematicall butchered in places like Auschwitz.

When Lisa organised that first trip with Bournemouth-based PalmAir (the visit also includes a few hours in the beautiful Polish city of Krakow) she didn't anticipate such a massive response. The first day trip inevitably led to a second, the second to a third, and that one, Lisa informed me very firmly, would be the last. So if I wanted to go, I'd better put my name down.

"Wanted to go" is, of course, a bad choice of words. A day trip to Auschwitz is not something anyone looks forward to. But there are many, many reasons why people from this part of the world would, and should, feel the need to visit the museum that stands on the site of history's most infamous act of genocide.

In a country like ours where the description 'Nazi' is bandied about with shameful egularity, it is a reminder of what precisely that term really stood for - the systematic degradation, torture and massacre of millions of human beings. An attempt to wipe Jewish people from the face of the earth.

Despite her decision that the third trip (the one I went on) would be the last, such has been the interest since, that Lisa has been forced to organise yet another flight from Belfast - the next one is leaving on March 1.

So what can you expect on the day? The museum at Auschwitz aims to remind people of the horror of what happened there - but it does so in a way that is not so graphic that it's repulsive..Organisers make the point that young people are among those they most want to appeal to. Poignant and deeply moving as the exhibits necessarily are, they are not so gruesome as to be unsuitable for school students. The most shocking initial impression of Auschwitz is how peaceful - how pretty even the place looks.

On a sunny autumn Polish afternoon the red brick buildings look no more innocuous than the old army barracks they began life as. The air is hushed, voices are subdued.

When you walk beneath the entrance archway with its nfamous slogan Arbeit Macht Frei (Freedom through work) - there is almost a sense that this is unreal. It's like walking on to a film set. You've seen this place so many times before - in movies, in the flickering newsreel of countless documentaries, in school history boo that it feels unnervingly familiar.

The full horror of Auschwitz lies behind the doors of the red brick buildings. It is that way now. And it was that was back then, too. Back in 1940 when the Nazis commandeered the old army camp on the outskirts of the Polish city of Oswiecim and turned it into the most shameful monument in history to man's inhumanity. Back then, too, Auschwitz-Birkenau from the outside did not betray the horror of what lay within its walls. The Nazis planned it with demonic touches. Each day for example, as the poor tortured souls incarcerated in the camp left for forced labour, classical music boomed out across the entrance gates.

Between one and two million people, most of them Jews, were systemically slaughtered at Auschwitz by the Nazis. Russians, Poles, gypsies, homosexuals and the physically and mentally disabled were put to death at the camp too.

The original camp was expanded and consisted of three main parts : Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz. It also had over 40 sub-camps. At first it was Poles who were imprisoned and murdered there. Then came Soviet prisoners of war, gypsies and prisoners of other nationalities.But, beginning in 1942, the camp became the site of the merciless massacre of the Jews as part of Hitler's 'Final Solution.'

It is impossible, even on a visit to the place, to grasp the enormity of what happened here. Millions of men, women and children were "processed" through this camp with hellish efficiency. Everything that they left behind, their clothes, their personal belongings, even their very hair, shaved off before they were gassed, was collected by the Nazis to be used again. The human hair was used to stuff mattresses.)

And small justice though it is, it is these things, the mundane, the everyday, the deeply, deeply personal that all these years later take their quiet, final vengeance on the Nazis who ripped them with such barbarity from the innocent.

For it is the things I've mentioned, the clothes, the personal belongings, the human hair, that are used with such moving effect as exhibits to convey the humanity of the victims, to reflect the individual suffering represented by that incomprehensible death toll and, above all, to encapsulate the utter evil of the men and women who perpetrated such crimes.

In room after room, behind glass, suspended in time, these are the exhibits. Here a mountain of spectacles, there hundreds upon hundreds of crutches and other disabled aids. You gaze at the mass of human hair and try to imagine a young woman shorn before death. What thoughts must have gone through her head? What thoughts must have gone through the head of the mother of the boy in the picture on the wall? He looks about 12, he's holding a baby in his arms. They would have been told they were going to a children's camp. Would their mother have felt relief at that? None of them could have known they were walking directly towards a gas chamber.

In a glass cabinet is a little girl's shoe. Beside it the remains of a doll. No words could ever convey what those simple, tattered remnants say about human suffering - and inhumanity.

The gas chamber is inevitably stark and chilling. Prisoners were told they were to have a shower here. Only at the last moment would they have seen the big holes in the ceiling. The big holes through which the Nazis dropped the canisters of gas. The ovens are more horrifying still. It is almost impossible to believe you are standing in a place where so many human beings were dispatched with such callous precision. In the cells where those prisoners who 'offended' were singled out for particularly cruel attention, in the vast dormitories where thousands were incarcerated without any thought for human dignity, at the wall where prisoners were executed by firing squad and above all, outside the block where nightmarish 'experiments' were performed on prisoners by fiendish 'doctors' the sense of despair is real and haunting.

Horror is conveyed to people by different things. To me it was the simplest thing - walking along the cobbled pathways of the camp and thinking of those people, over 60 years ago, whose tortured footsteps we were tracing.

Moving and powerful - those are apt descriptions of Auschwitz. I thought it would be deeply disturbing, nightmarish too. But it is not.

For amid the horror, like the light in the shining eyes of the young girl in a picture being herded to her death, is the unquenchable spirit of all that is good in mankind. Sixty years ago, Auschwitz and its survivors were liberated. The Jews were not wiped from the face of the earth. They built a new future and a new nation.

But we should never forget how terrifyingly, disgustingly, savagely close Hitler came to his 'Final Solution.'

We should all go to Auschwitz some day. And we should take our children. . For details of the next day trip from Belfast to Auschwitz contact Lisa Leopold on 9028 8129 or email leslie.leopold@ntlworld.com