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Having spent the large part of Wednesday March 14th (2019) at Auschwitz-Birkenau I’ve now had time to organise my thoughts.
First and foremost, having now made that pilgrimage,having been there, I will try never to return.
I have been aware all of my adult life of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. A few years ago I went to Sachsenhausen Camp when visiting Berlin, and the enormity of what took place there had a lasting impact which has stayed with me, so I thought myself prepared, until Wednesday.

Numbers are strange, thousands, ten and hundreds of thousands, even millions, billions and now trillions are just numbers. We talk of billions of people on our planet. In the United States they talk of now tens of trillions of National Debt numbers rationalised down into a manageable formats.

For me Auschwitz-Birkenau gives a whole new meaning to numbers. The incredible scale of Murder. A vast industrial process of MURDER which took over a million lives at just that one location.
The site is both a Museum and a Memorial, visited by thousands each day. While I was there 15 or 20 buses brought large groups, many of older school children the bulk of whom I believe were Poles plus large and small groups of regular tourists from around the world. The site must therefore be visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year, many many times the number of victims it claimed must have since visited yet still the place echoes with the enormity of what occurred there.

From my perspective the concept of a genocidal mass extermination of people is somehow made worse (if that is possible) by the commercialism of extracting a form of monetary value from the act of massacre. Not so much assets to be exploited but waste to be sifted into recyclable components. Human hair, spectacles, and the shoes of victims piled high leave a bitter taste and a hollow emptyness in the pit of one’s stomach.

As a final thought regarding that truly terrible place, we would all do well to remember that while German Death Camps caused the deaths of about 6 million people, guestimates suggest that as many as 100 million people have been murdered during the last century as the result of totalitarian regimes on both the right and more especially the left . From the Russian Gulags to the Killing Fields of South-East Asia industrial mass murder has been a feature of our modern world.