Holocaust Memorial Day

27 January is a national event in the U.K dedicated to the remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust. First held in January 2001, the chosen date is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp by the Red Army in 1945.

I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1996 during a weeks stay in Krakow which is some three quarters of an hour drive to the east of the Polish town of Oswiecim (pronounced as Oz-Ven-Shum I believe). Auschwitz, a word that has become synonymous with the evil that men do, is the German name for this less than overwhelming town in Southern Poland. Brzezinka is the Polish name for Birkenau - the word Brzezinka means birch forest.

On the day that I visited the town, as part of a small group in a mini bus, one of those strange unexplainable things happened, as we drove into the town the temperature dropped dramatically, it had already been snowing since October and it was now March, but the sky's grew darker, it grew perceptibly colder and the snow fell heavier.

Nothing can prepare you for Auschwitz. I know that sounds trite and simple but it's true.

The camp complex consisted of three main camps, there were also around 40 further satellite camps within the area, some with a few prisoners and some with many thousand. There are two images of the Auschwitz camp that we are all familiar with, the gates with the words 'Arbeit Macht Frei ('work gives freedom') and the unloading ramps and the guard tower over the railway lines - these are a two different places, the gates at Auschwitz I and the ramps etc at Auschwitz II (Birkeanu).

Children under-12 are not allowed in either camp, the reason must be respect, the idea that small children could be running around or shouting and screaming the thought behind their omission.

The first part of the visit was taken up by viewing a film in the media centre, I remember that the person introducing the film explained that due to the upsetting nature of the film the curtains in the hall would not be closed completely. When the film had finished there was complete silence before we were asked to leave, there were several hundred people there at the same time and we all filed out into the snow not quite knowing what to say or indeed whether to make eye contact.

At one of the bookstores I purchased KL Auschwitz Seen By The SS. It contains the autobiography of the camp commandant Rudolf Hoss and the diaries of Pery Broad and Johann Paul Kremer. The book is around 250 pages long and I would recommend it to anybody with an interest in history, I should warn you though it is not something that can be read in one go and your emotions will swing between shock, anger, compassion (for the victims) and a sense of the surreal.

The visit to Auschwitz I - the administration centre as it was known - is very difficult to put into words because it is a physical almost spiritual experience - I use the word spiritual in its non-religious context here. To enter Block 11 (the Block of Death) and see the room where the summary court held its sittings and then to step outside on the crunching snow and stare, speechless, at the execution or 'death wall' is something that feels you with a sense of anger as much as anything.

There was one moment that I, and it must be said most of my fellow visitors, felt uneasy with and that was the way suitcases had been arranged in the exhibition hall within the camp. As you are probably aware the names of those who were transported to the camp were written in chalk on the outside of the cases - on the day I was there, and let's be honest there's no reason to suspect it's any different today, all the names were familiar to us - as if somebody had purposefully arranged it to say 'look, these weren't just victims - they were people like you, me and those Hollywood stars you know'.

On one wall is a railway map of the main lines in Europe at the time of the camps conversion from Polish army barracks to death camp and the towns strategic importance becomes sadly more obvious - all roads lead to Oswiecim.

From the main barracks, with their displays of suitcases, shoes, gold, spectacles and hair that was taken from the victims and used to stuff pillows and mattresses on U-Boats, we were taken to the gas chamber where experiments using Zyklon B were carried out.

From Auschwitz I it is a short drive to Auschwitz II.

Standing in the guard room above the 'death gate' at Birkenau it is impossible to stifle either a sense of wonder or a sense of outrage and horror - both of which seem totally inadequate in the context of what you are about to experience. The thing that strikes you about Birkenau, and it is very difficult to convey this to people, is its sheer size. It is enormous, as far as the eye can see into the distance is the camp, stretching into the silver birch forest from which the village takes its name.

In the group I visited the camp with were a group of four train drivers from Liverpool Street, as I walked with one of them down the railway tracks inside the camp he suddenly stopped and knelt down beside the track. He then made the observation that the railway tracks markings indicated that the rails used were actually made in Russia, we then speculated as to how they had come to be in Poland - given the existence of the camp before Hitler began his Eastern Front. It is widely accepted that the Allies knew of Auschwitz as early as 1941 but dismissed the reports of the numbers of deaths as exaggeration.

Walking around the camp at the end of winter you don't know how to react after a while, I know that sounds daft but I felt the same experience reading The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert before I went to Poland - after a while you feel a sense of number blindness.

The overwhelming feeling though was one of surprise that the Germans actually thought they could get away with it. They did of course try to conceal some of their work by attempting to blow up one of the crematoria, in fact a prisoners revolt succeeded in blowing up one of the four crematoria.

The number who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau is constantly revived but the numbers themselves become meaningless when you look at it in the context of what was trying to be achieved - the genocide of non-Aryans. The camp commandant, Rudolf Hoss, testified at Nuremberg that three million had died there. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum revised this figure in 1990, and new calculations now place the figure at 1.1–1.6 million, about 90 percent of them Jews from almost every country in Europe.

That visit in 1996 left an impression of me that will stay with me forever. It was awe inspiring because of what happened there and the calculated methods used to achieve it. The ruthless efficiency of Auschwitz I and the size, scale and horror of Auschwitz II are something we should never forget.

Incidentally, have a look at that picture of the gate at Auschwitz I again. The 'B' in arbeit is actually upside down - this was a deliberate act by the Jewish inmate who made the sign, it was a show of defiance that said however perfect the Nazi's wanted their world, their prisoners were not going to help them achieve it.