17th May, 2005

DAVID ADAMS

It was the age of the SS guards that struck Dr Mark Tronson most during his recent trip to the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

“Our Israeli guide was telling is that most of these SS guards at these death camps came out of the Hitler Youth movement; they were totally committed to the cause and were in most cases aged in their early 20s...” he says. “That is something that I had not understood before.”

Dr Tronson says he later reflected that the lack of empathy and feeling felt by the guards was probably not surprising given their relatively youthful age.

“The Corrie ten Boom book (The Hiding Place) speaks of them as teenagers and teenagers don’t have the maturity to develop a sense of empathy at all. Teenagers and young people feel that they are totally indestructible. But more than that, they were indoctrinated into this super-race ideology. So there was no quarter given.”

Dr Tronson, a former chaplain to the Australian cricket team and the chairman of Well-Being Australia, went to Auschwitz as a member of a 48 person international delegation invited by Jerusalem-based Christian organisation Bridges for Peace to attend the annual “March of the Living” which this year commemorated 60 years since the liberation of Europe’s Nazi death camps.

The March of the Living event has been held every year since 1988 and sees Jewish teenagers from all over the world descend on Poland to walk the two miles from Auschwitz to Birkenau in commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day. This year’s event attracted crowds estimated to be up to 21,000.

Along with concentration camp survivors, this year’s attendees included Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. He told the young Jewish people who had gathered for the commemoration that they should not stop the tears many would experience.

“Let them flow, and remember them,” he said. “Remember the pain and rage which prompted them. Take this with you, to your homes and tell it to your friends, neighbours and acquaintances and strangers.”

Prime Minister Sharon said it was incumbent upon those young Jews to tell to the Holocaust when there was no longer anyone left who could provide a firsthand account.

“Always remember the victims - and never forget the murderers,” he said.

Dr Tronson, who laid two wooden commemorative plaque at the entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, says that while the service was solemn, one of the speakers - the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem - emphasised the purpose of the march as an “affirmation of life rather than the despondency of the past”.

Peter Scotland, who accompanied Dr Tronson on the trip and later to the Ukraine where they visited Bridges for Peace missions, describes what he saw at Auschwitz.

“If my math is correct it would take 60 days to read the names of all those murdered only at Auschwitz (four seconds x 1,300,000)...” he writes in an email.

“We walked along the road past factories where fit Jewish men worked from the camp. Along the railway line that leads into Birkenau and then splits into two and between is the railway platform where 'selection' took place after they came off the train cattle cages.

“Josef Mengele moved a finger to left or right; and right was gas chamber. Almost 100 per cent of women and children went right. Those to the right were dead within 30 minutes depending on volume of arrivals. The chambers killed up to 3,000 human living people each day by gassing.

“We walked through the living quarters for those who had to wait or those who worked,13 to a bed space and no heating and fireplaces that did not work.

“(The Allies) found 835,000 women’s dresses, 35,000 pairs of men’s shoes, and 1,450 kilograms of female hair left at the site when they arrived. Plus numerous thousands of cans of empty Zyklon B gas pellets.”

THE GATES OF HELL: Peter Scotland stands at the gates of Auschwitz. “(The Allies) found 835,000 women’s dresses, 35,000 pairs of men’s shoes, and 1,450 kilograms of female hair left at the site when they arrived. Plus numerous thousands of cans of empty Zyklon B gas pellets.”

While at Auschwitz, the Australians also had the chance to speak to some of the camp survivors including Tsak Cynbler who had brought a photograph of himself as a camp prisoner.

Writing after the visit, Scotland describes speaking with survivors as a “remarkable experience”.

“The dust they were standing on was from cremated dead bodies - they said it was sacred ground,” he says.

Along with Warsaw and Krakow, among the other places Dr Tronson and Scotland visited during five days was the Majdanek concentration camp where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered before it’s liberation by the Red Army in October 1944.

In an email he wrote after he visit, he describes it as “the most terrible place I have seen in my 53 years”.

“We walked into the gas chamber, we saw where the gold teeth were pulled from the dead bodies and where the bodies were cremated,” he wrote. “And all in sight (of the nearby town) of Lublin.”

He says that while Auschwitz today is the “sanitised, public exhibition of the Holocaust” Majdanek remains “the real thing: mankind gone made, mankind lost, mankind without a soul”.

“I’m still having bad dreams,” he wrote after the visit to Majdanek. “My advice is don’t go there. It is a glimpse of hell.”


~ March of the Living International

www.motl.org