People Centricity by Stephen Hewett

Author:Stephen Hewett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Personal Development
Publisher: The Conrad Press
Published: 2017-01-30T11:20:58+00:00

My Own Visit to Auschwitz: An Experience That Completely Changed My Life

A few years ago I went to visit Auschwitz myself. I was there for about five hours altogether.

Auschwitz is about an hour and twenty minutes drive from Cracow in Poland. There is a town nearby, but the location of Auschwitz itself is very rural.

I went around on a guided tour. Auschwitz is not in any way colorful — it’s very grey and drab and quite depressing. There are thousands of people walking around at any given time. Typically, in our group, we were taken around with about a group of twenty people. The guide, who was Polish, delivered lots of factual information but in a very neutral voice, not expressing any kind of emotion really, which was entirely appropriate for that scenario. Typically, you’re taken around Auschwitz first, which is a brick-built camp. All the buildings have been preserved, you’re shown what the accommodation looks like, you’re shown where people were taken, you’re shown a particular area which I think they call — if I remember correctly — “Little California,” which is where all the belongings were taken to be sorted through. They’ve still got quite a lot of those, so there are literally rooms full of children’s shoes and rooms full of suitcases, the originals, and rooms full of human hair which was shaved off.

One thing I didn’t realise concerned the tattoos that people have on their arms. These were only given to people who were taken to the camp to be workers. People who were taken straight to the crematoriums, the gas chambers, didn’t get tattoos — there was no point. The reason the Nazis came up with the tattoos idea was because they used to take pictures of inmates for identification purposes, but what they discovered was that within four to six weeks of somebody being in the camp, they were unrecognisable, because they had lost so much weight and were so ill. Tattoos were found to be more effective at identifying inmates than photographs.

The visit to Auschwitz was enormously moving and yet also absolutely terrible. That day I saw the full terrible extent of human depravity.

We were then taken to Birkenau, which is where the majority of the gas chambers are. The experience was absolutely harrowing.

Something that made a particularly awful impression on me was that the commandant’s luxury house is literally fifty yards from the wall of the camp. The commandant’s children played there, his wife worked there, hung out the washing, and just over the wall, there were people literally being exterminated and murdered. This seemed to me extraordinary.

Auschwitz is a dreadful cautionary tale of what happens when you suspend People Centricity completely. What is especially horrifying is clearly the way the executions at Auschwitz were carried out cold blood. Inmates were not shot down in anger by the guards, they were murdered with clinical and chilling indifference and, yes, in cold blood. Indeed, our guide made a point of saying that thousands of people arrived, usually on a daily basis.

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