“It really is the most terrible, terrible place.” My late father’s voice, on a small Dictaphone tape, speaks to me clearly down three decades. He made the recording at Auschwitz-Birkenau–murderous epicentre of Nazi Germany’s so-called ‘Final Solution’–on a swelteringly hot day, 23 August 1991. He was then a history lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, on academic sabbatical. He was devising a new Eastern Europe course for his students, as European communism collapsed. Four days earlier, disembarking from a ship at Sopot, on Poland’s Baltic coast, he recorded the surprising news of a failed coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union (19-21 August). An electric rumour had spread among the passengers. The shackles of communism in Europe were falling off. As his thoughts revealed on tape, history had certainly not ended. In Eastern Europe, it was biting back.
Then–from the Hotel Polonia, Krakow–my father visited Auschwitz (Oswiecim) in southern Poland. Then, as now, these are the eternally shocking statistics of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Nazis murdered around 1.1 million people in two camps here from 1940-1945, the vast majority of whom were Jewish. One million European Jews, 70,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma/Sinti gypsies, 14-15,000 Soviet POWs, and around 12,000 others were killed at Auschwitz. My father recorded his impressions as he walked, guideless, around Auschwitz I (Concentration Camp). It affected him profoundly. “It placed a tremendous weight on me,” his tape reveals. “This place has gone beyond what I imagined in terms of evil.”
From there, he travelled by foot to the sprawling Auschwitz II (Birkenau) purpose-built extermination site, 3.5 km away. This much larger facility also lay within the ‘zone of interest’ (security area) which surrounded both camps to a distance of forty square miles. Few other visitors were around that day, he noted, as he felt the air at these twin centres of European mass murder and unspeakable suffering.
Earlier this year, I followed in my father’s footsteps to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau for the 80th anniversary of its liberation by Soviet soldiers (on 27 January 1945). I had never listened to his tape in full before. His words left me a powerful guide. I am five years older now than he was when he taped it. I was deeply curious to see what he had seen. The world of 1991, and its promise, has also long since vanished, replaced in 2025 by new European geopolitical realities.
For me, I experienced this appalling site of evil in ways both similar to my father and vastly different. As a family, we had no direct connection with Auschwitz or the suffering unleashed there on so many lives. Then, as now, my father and I visited as British outsiders, for our historical interest and moral education alone. This is motivation enough for most people, who approach with reflection and a degree of reverence.
When I arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum’s new Visitor Centre, I compared experiences. Oswiecim’s Railway Station, where my father arrived in 1991, was brand new, rebuilt in 2020. Today, Auschwitz-Birkenau is a site of large-scale modern pilgrimage. In 2024, visitor numbers totalled 1.83 million people. On my visit, the new car park was filled to capacity. People from all over the world were queuing to enter, via airport style security, ID required. I joined a large tour group, with headphones and receivers, entering along new long concrete tunnels. The names of victims were read out solemnly on a public address system. Passing through the infamous main gate, with its cynical ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘Work Sets You Free’) sign, we proceeded into the main concentration camp. This former Polish Army barracks, built in the 1920s, held Polish political prisoners from May 1940. 15,000-20,000 inmates were incarcerated here under brutal conditions. In late 1941, it also became the first site prisoners were killed by Zyklon B gas pellets. Silver birch trees interrupted the barrack block lines and tunnels of formerly electrified barbed wire.
It was a sunny winter’s afternoon with an almost full moon visible in a beautiful blue cloudless sky. On the surface, the setting was incongruous. I wondered whether I would agree with my father’s impressions. It was hard on such a day to imagine the evil meted out to so many innocent people. But when we entered the barrack blocks, everything changed. The personal belongings of the prisoners were on display, an affront to the senses. Then, in Block 11–the punishment section and a ‘prison within a prison’–reality hit home. Passing its underground starvation cells and the ‘Wall of Death’ nearby, where inmates were shot by the thousand, my father’s taped words said it all: “This is the only place I know that I will be truly relieved to get out of.” I felt the same.
We emerged onto the pathway where corpses were wheeled, prisoners beaten, hanged or driven to the camp’s first gas chamber and crematorium. We walked through the empty crematorium itself with its ovens accusing and still extant. It was a numbing experience. For my father, it was here that he recorded his irritation at tourists taking pictures of each other in front of it all. The sight of Camp Commandant Rudolf Hoss’ 1930s family home adjoining the main camp (soon to be accessible to visitors and featured in the 2023 film ‘Zone of Interest’) puzzled the will further; that humanity is capable of presiding over such evil, for so prolonged a period.
Birkenau, 3.5 km away and built by Soviet POWs from late 1941, is the real killing field of Auschwitz. On my visit, its notorious main arch was still partially shrouded by a large white tent, constructed for the moving 80th anniversary public commemorations on 27 January, attended by survivors and world leaders from 54 countries. Unlike my father, I arrived by shuttle bus. Here, the extensive red brick remains of barrack blocks, the twin railway line and many chimneys stretched to the bleak horizon. It was like the ruins of classical antiquity but with the whispered admonition–‘Never Again.’ My father in 1991 noted it was “quite different from what I’d imagined”–because of its size and extent. He explored on his own, I was part of a large tour group. Our Polish guide was a straight-talking kind of woman. Birkenau, she said, held up to 90,000 inmates and from 1942 was an abattoir for humans on a truly industrial scale. Here, innocents descended into hell on earth, driven from trains onto an infamous ramp, waiting unwittingly before selection by the SS for mass murder in the site’s (now destroyed) gas chambers and crematoria. Birkenau was dreadfully efficient.
At the height of operations in summer 1944, around 6,000 (mostly Jewish) people were killed every day. Others were worked to death. Allied air reconnaissance photographs identified the site in full operation from mid-1944, but no direct action was taken. I found the sheer extent of Birkenau disorientating. My father’s tape continued: “I get flashes of the wickedness but it’s very hard to imagine it all happening here, after all this time passed.’ Under the smiling blue sky, in our tour group, I had to agree. Walking along the paths, flanked by watchtowers and barbed wire, my father further noted: “No escape possible. Abandon hope all who enter here.” After seeing the interior of a preserved barrack block his tape went on: “It was like a badly lit stable. You can feel the tears, where the poor souls suffered.” This was my enduring impression too. Auschwitz’s interiors seem to hold the greatest pain. The railway terminated near Birkenau’s modernist Memorial to the cry of despair of its victims. Literally and figuratively, this was the end of the line for so many Jews and others.
Polish Pope John Paul II told the world in 1979 that it was ‘impermissible’ for anyone to pass by this place and remain indifferent. The clear lesson? Those who dehumanise others are themselves dehumanised. As I left, reflecting on my father’s and my own challenging and sombre day’s experience, my Polish taxi driver Krysztof summed it all up: “This is the blackest place for humanity on this earth.”
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