Young
Unionists

This week has seen Northern Ireland confronting one its rawest emotions. However amongst our own problems a significant day in the remembrance of victims will have slipped by many peoples radars; Tuesday marked National Holocaust Day. It was 64 years since Soviet troops liberated the camp at Auschwitz in southern Poland and brought to an end the most awful example of human wickedness that this planet has ever seen. It was important that this camp was maintained in its more or less original state to remind us that this world can never again allow a single country to inflict such evil on human beings. I personally visited the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz this September with a few friends and I would definitely recommend the experience to anyone. It truly is a horrifying place and you really do need to physically stand in the gas chambers to fully understand the horror of which the camps prisoners must have felt in the moments leading up to their deaths The pictures attached to this blog are just a small number of which I took while I was there.

The reality of the camp strikes you immediately when you step in through those famous front gates. All the buildings are either original or build exactly to scale with original materials, the barbed wire is starting to rust and the steps inside the buildings have been visibly worn down by its estimated 22million visitors since its liberation.

The above picture on the left is just a small amount of the artificial limbs which the Nazis confiscated from the prisoners as they arrived at the camps. They were then often forced to hobble into the gas chambers while their limbs were sent away to be used by German soldiers injured in the war. On the left is a picture of a typical toilet block where 100s of prisoners would have been crammed in at a time therefore it was a constant struggle for the most primitave utilities.

Of course when the Nazis realised that death camps were a rather effective tool in their aim of wiping out a entire religion- the demand for space rose significantly. Therefore the original site at Auschwitz was expanded in 1941, with a new camp built just a short distance away at Birkenau; this was genocide on an industrial scale. Jews were now being purged throughout all the occupied territories and brought to this new camp shipped like cattle in trains. Hungary in particular suffered under the Nazis with an estimated 600,000 Hungarian Jews being killed in Birkenau.

The above building has to be on one of the most tragic sites that one could possibly visit. Although it may seem nothing more than a old unassuming shed, it is instead the first gas chamber on the Aushwitch original camp. You go inside the dark building and through a few rooms in which people were forced to undress, you then go into the next long room which although there is nothing to suggest it, is the gas chamber. The only feature it has is a small square hole in the roof in which the chemical pellets were poured in, these pellets would then produce a cyanide gas which would ultimately kill all those who came into contact with it. The bodies were then carried into the next room where the would be incinerated. On the Birkeneau camp the gas chambers were many times bigger and the bodies were often burned in piles in the open air.

It is estimated that 1.1million people were killed in the Auschwitz Camps, hundreds of thousands more died due to forced labour and malnourishment.  The Auschwitz Nazi commander, Rudolf Höss, was hanged only yards from the gas chamber where he ordered the death of thousands, the gallows still stand today in their original state as a constant reminder of the evil of which the human race is capable of undertaking.

Therefore whilst Northern Ireland has had its own problems with ethnic cleansing, we should remember the lives of the millions which were murdered in the German death camps- their only crime being their religious faith.