Sobering visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau for air squadron students

A black-and-white image of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps taken through one of its barbed wire fences, showing the brick buildings beyond

Today, the world is marking 80 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps. Some of the region’s students have very recent experiences of the Polish site they will surely be reflecting on this Holocaust Memorial Day.

Just 10 days ago, students in Cambridge University Air Squadron returned from a trip to Poland. Their trip was designed to improve their understanding of the Holocaust, during which some six million people, mostly Jews, were murdered by Germany’s Nazi regime.

The air squadron’s students flew from RAF Wittering to Krakow, Poland’s second city, from where they travelled to Walwel Castle. For centuries the castle was the seat and symbol of the Polish monarchy, and now houses the 20th most visited art museum in the world.

But during the Second World War it was claimed by the Nazi governor general of Poland, Hans Frank—later tried and executed as a war criminal—to be his personal residence and headquarters. The students heard about his close involvement with the Holocaust.

One of the surviving sections of the wall in Krakow that separated the Jewish ghetto from the rest of the city, sloping downhill away from the camera with bare trees on the other side
A surviving section of the Jewish Ghetto wall seen by the air squadron students in Krakow, with a design meant to resemble headstones

The following day, the students visited the Jewish Ghetto in Krakow where Nazis had confined the city’s Jewish population in 1941 and the awful conditions within. They were disturbed to learn that the Ghetto wall had been designed to resemble a series of headstones.

Members of the air squadron then visited the Oskar Schindler Factory Museum, where they heard how Schindler saved more than a thousand Jewish people from Auschwitz-Birkenau—actions celebrated in the book Schindler’s Ark and the Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List.

Now more aware of the historical context for the Nazis’ genocide, the students travelled to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps themselves on their third full day in Poland.

They received a guided tour around the former concentration camp and the neighbouring extermination camp site. They learned that camp guards had destroyed much of the latter as they fled the advancing Soviet Red Army, trying to conceal evidence of their hideous crimes.

Following a quiet evening as they absorbed and discussed what they had seen and heard, the students packed and made their way to their flight home as the sun rose again.

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