AUSCHWITZ ...AND A LESSON FROM HISTORY; Students Learn of Nazi Concentration Camp Horrors

Byline: JONNY GREATREX

AUSCHWITZ. The very name chills to the bone.

It represents one of humanity's darkest chapters and unimaginable suffering.

But when you stand on the train tracks at the infamous brick entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau it is striking how little was required to carry out genocide.

There is no huge imposing structure dominating the landscape.

All that was needed to murder more than a million Jews was a field, barbed wire fencing and a few low-rise buildings to house those kept alive so they could be worked to death.

"Arbeit Macht Frei" reads the sign above the gates - "Work makes you free".

The final elements were the barbarous will of Hitler's Third Reich - and the gas chambers, instruments of mass murder.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau camps now house a museum and permanent memorial to those who died there.

The Sunday Mercury joined 200 Midland students who visited the site as part of a long-running Holocaust Educational Trust project aimed at making sure the horrific events are neither forgotten nor repeated. …

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: AUSCHWITZ ...AND A LESSON FROM HISTORY; Students Learn of Nazi Concentration Camp Horrors. Contributors: Not available. Newspaper title: Sunday Mercury (Birmingham, England). Publication date: April 8, 2012. Page number: 12. © 2009 Birmingham Post & Mail Ltd. COPYRIGHT 2012 Gale Group.

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