Last year I travelled with the Holocaust Educational Trust to Auschwitz and the experience had a profound effect. I had been warned it would, but having been a voracious reader of Holocaust memoirs and literature, I thought I was prepared for what I would see. Others have written more eloquently on this subject. Mark Ferguson, who was on the same trip as me wrote an excellent piece on Labour List to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. As he says, there is no ‘normal’ way to respond to what you see at Auschwitz.
As we passed the infamous IG Farben chemical works and the site of the British POW camp E715, I was struck by how little we know about this place, even after the success of the bestseller The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz, Denis Avey’s memoir of his time in the camp.
More than a thousand British soldiers found themselves at the ‘anus mundi’ and the unwitting witnesses to the Holocaust.
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