I visited Auschwitz for the first time in February What I can do is recommend two superb works about the Holocaust, released almost forty years apart. The first is Shoah , a nine-hour documentary split into two parts by director Claude Lanzmann. Filmed over an eleven-year period before its release in , Lanzmann relied solely on interviews with a mixture of survivors, witnesses and even perpetrators, refusing to draw on archival footage. The result is breathtaking, often overwhelming, and as comprehensive as one would expect for a project this ambitious.
The sceptical reaction they faced was as mind-boggling as their route out of Auschwitz. Though about forty miles away from Auschwitz, Krakow also never lets you forget its tragic past. I had never even been to Poland before we met. By the time the Pareja de Hecho and I left Krakow in October , I had only a few pages in my passport left unstamped by Polish immigration officials — some less profligate with space than others — each fading impression a material reminder of the added complexities posed to us by Brexit.
When I first visited in December , there were other formalities to consider. The Wizz Air flight leaving Luton Airport that Friday night was half-full at best, something I cannot say for other journeys on this route over the next weeks and months.
Whatever I thought then, I know I feel differently now. Any city where this happened would be dearer to me than many, if not all, others. All this is set against a climate that could, within days, go from humid to hailstorms… blue skies to inducing the bluest of lips. Apart from these occasional aberrations, the seasons are pronounced and discernible winters prompt reflection on how punishing they must have been for those who came before. Just behind the mound facing south from Krakow is a disused quarry, now overrun with greenery.
But then I saw the faint outline of a structure protruding above the foliage as though built to oversee what lay beneath. I checked my phone, fearing I was looking at the remains of a watchtower. The Nazis, it transpired, used the area — known as Liban Quarry — as a penal labour camp, its limestone cliffs shielding the atrocities from the wider city. Traces of the set supposedly remain embedded among the genuine artefacts from the war.
