There are a very complex set of responses you experience when you visit Auschwitz.
It’s a place that many people feel they should visit because it is such a monumental and symbolic event in recent human history. But it speaks especially loudly to us at Scottish Refugee Council because it represents the genesis and the catalyst for the 1951 Refugee Convention.
A calculated kind of terror
My visit, organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust, places me face-to-face with the atrocities people went through. Auschwitz is both vast and at the same time small in a curious way.
Having seen photos of hundreds of people cramped crowded in the camp, I’m still surprised how much smaller the gas chambers and crematoria seem. Perhaps it’s the reality of the camp sinking in. Seeing the human hair and baby clothes on display of people who suffered here makes me grasp the real terror of what happened in this place.
Just as shocking, these horrors were housed in a well-planned complex; the railway tracks run smooth and straight through that familiar arched entrance, the buildings are laid out in neat militaristic rows. Auschwitz was constructed with cold, logical care to be an effective killing factory as possible.
Real people not processes and procedure
I’m struck by how the people who worked in this place could disregard the millions going to their deaths. The officers, the guards, the wardens, the train drivers – they all abandoned any degree of compassion or empathy. To them these people were simply units moving through the process.
This is an attitude that Scottish Refugee Council is not so unfamiliar with. Dealing with the UK Border Agency and working through the asylum system, we do sometimes hear the industrial language of units and product lines, of targets and quotas. All too often we encounter a process that seems to forget that it is dealing with human beings.
The Refugee Convention – as vital today
Visiting Auschwitz left me with a renewed clarity about the mission of Scottish Refugee Council. Standing on ground where 70 years ago, people were being ushered to their death, it reaffirmed what a huge achievement the 1951 Refugee Convention represented. It made me remember why it is so important to offer refuge, safety and sanctuary to people of today’s genocides in Darfur, in Rwanda, the Congo.
And it reaffirmed how important our work remains today.
