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Howard's Way.... a weekly column from the Rt. Hon. Michael Howard QC. MP. 

20 November 2008

Last Thursday I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau with Frederick Smith and Daniel Jarvis from the Harvey Grammar School.

The trip was organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust. There were over 200 of us in all, four other Members of Parliament, around 200 pupils from various schools in the South East and also the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi and other faith leaders.

We gathered at Gatwick very early – check in time was 5.00am! The flight to Poland took just over two hours. Auschwitz-Birkenau is in Southern Poland near the border with Slovakia. It is about an hour’s bus journey from Krakow which is where our plane landed.

The camp itself was the biggest of the six death camps established by the Nazis.

More than a million people perished there. My grandmother was one of them.

The camp has two distinct parts. At Auschwitz itself there is a museum where you can see hundreds of suitcases belonging to people who arrived at the camp believing they were going to be resettled. These suitcases bear the names of their owners – often pitifully young children. Another exhibit is made up of the hair of the inmates – all of whom were shaved as part of the dehumanisation process. You can also see thousands of shoes left behind by those who perished. We were shown the buildings where medical experiments were carried out, the areas where prisoners were executed and the first of the gas chambers where the inmates were exterminated.

Birkenau, the other part of the complex, is a huge bleak place. This is where most of the killing took place. Here is the railway platform where new arrivals were subjected to the selection process – dividing those who were sent straight to the gas chambers from those who were kept alive to work. And here, too, are the sites of the gas chambers themselves.

It was a chastening, haunting visit, the memories of which will remain with me and, I am sure, Frederick and Daniel for a very long time.

And there are lessons to be learned. In a world where many people are being killed today it is important that we do not forget the very worst example in history of man’s inhumanity to man. It is a reminder to us all of the need to do all we can to prevent any similar atrocities from ever happening again.