Chapter 43: The Holocaust
This chapter of A History of Europe in 75 Train Journeys takes us to the darkest moment in all of our continent’s bloody history. If this was a BBC news report, they would warn that some people may find the contents of this post distressing. That is true. But it’s also crucial we never forget what we - as people - are capable of.Transcript:
MAY 2006: BERLIN LICHTENBERG
I’ve never before not felt thrilled to be on a sleeper train.
I’m a sucker for the romance and excitement that comes from going to bed in one country, and waking up in another.
So why not this time?
We’re travelling from Berlin to Kraków. It will be my first ever time in Poland and Kraków is meant to be lovely.
But as the train heaves its way out of the station, it’s not the ancient Polish capital that’s on my mind, but a small, rail-connected facility in the Polish town of Oświęcim, 40 miles outside. While the town is Polish, the site is better known to the world by the German name which was used during its period of operation: Auschwitz.
And I’m travelling there from west to east on a night train from Germany to Poland.
What were they thinking, all those fellow humans who travelled these very tracks before me? Did they know where they were going? Did they know why?
How could they? Even though they were in a cattle truck, not a passenger carriage. Even though they’d been forced into it by a regime they knew hated them. Even though they would have heard the rumours, how could they imagine it? Industrialised mass murder feels inconceivable, impossible, unbearable now - and we know it happened.
What did they think? What did they feel? They were on their way to a country most of them will never have been to before, sent by people who had long since stopped regarding them as human. The fear must have been overwhelming.
I know where we’re going. I’ve seen the photos. I know about the railway line that brought them through the gates. And the ramp where they would be sorted between those to die now and those to die later. I wish there wasn’t a railway line. I don’t want the railways implicated.
But this was an industrialised process, and the railways were at the heart of twentieth-century industry.
The horror of the holocaust is so much greater because it was so modern. The photos of Auschwitz look so similar in style to the 1930s extensions of the tube. Same style of walls; same style of lamps. Horror is ever-present in history but it doesn’t normally travel by train.
My night train passes over a set of points “clickety clack”. I think of the signalman pulling the points; setting the train in the direction it was scheduled to go. Did he know what he was doing? To what end he was pulling those points?
Of course he did. Signallers always know what’s in the trains; coal, aggregates, grain, Jews.
But what could he do? Refuse to pull the points? Resign? Maybe he should have done. The trains would still have run, though. Where does culpability stop? What would I have done in his shoes? I’ve been a railway employee.
Oh, these are horrible questions! Questions that must be asked only in a society utterly corrupted.
“Clickety click”. It’s a rhythmic, repeating sound, every couple of seconds. I imagine each one is a human being being reduced to a puff of smoke. “Clickety click”. Another person murdered. “Clickety click”. And another. And another. And another. So many.
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The train is one of those old locomotive and carriage affairs, which means that - if you walk to the back - you can look out of the rear window and see the railway lines. I push my way down the narrow, crowded corridor. The coaches are dark and the lights dim. Families are settling themselves to bed; couples are sitting drinking. “Verzeihung”, I say, “excuse me”, in German.
I reach the back window. The tracks stretch, perfectly straight, behind the train, shining and then disappear into the gloom.
I stare at the tracks and the blur of the sleepers with a heavy knot of misery in my stomach. I’m two years into a transport career and have just finished a graduate training scheme with Britain’s largest rail operator. I chose this career because trains are, for me, the ultimate symbol of hope. They are about human connection: about love and life, job interviews and business deals, birthday parties and illicit affairs. But now these lines, receding rapidly into the west, look sinister. I hate how the railway was corrupted for this evil.
In Mechelen, there is a Belgian state railway cattle truck on display outside the Kazerne Dossin, the site where Jews were stored before transportation to the East. The truck has the SNCB logo on the side. It’s the same logo as used today. The joy of European train travel is the way every country is connected to every other. This connectivity was turned to poison by such a use of it.
Poison. Why did the SS put the poison in themselves? They did, you know. They forced the prisoners to do literally everything else. Prisoners had to herd the victims into the gas chambers and to push the bodies out again and retrieve the valuables and load the corpses into the ovens and cook the bodies and sweep up the ash.
The only thing the SS did was drop the capsules of poison into the chambers.
Why?
Did they want to? Did they want to know that every victim was killed by a card-carrying Nazi?
Or was there some minuscule stirring of bureaucratic empathy in not forcing Jews to murder their own kind; possibly their own families?
The prisoners forced into running the camps were known as the Sonderkommando. It only means “special command” but whenever I see the word “Sonder” used in German I feel a sudden shock to the stomach as I remember these poor souls who survived only by facilitating the mass murder of their friends. I sometimes see it on the front of trams.
The Sonderkommando felt more positive about trains… if anyone could feel positive about anything in those circumstances. The hideous corruption of morals forced by their circumstances meant that their only hope was when they heard that a train was on its way. Thousands of victims crammed into wagons, destined for extermination, meant - to the Sonderkommando - food. You see, the SS didn’t give them enough to eat. They had to steal the last food from those doomed to die, before assisting in their murder.
I hate the men who forced them into this horror.
“Clickety click”. It’s still going on. How many more imaginary Jews have died in my head since I first heard it? “Clickety click”. I imagine I’m going to sit up all night and count. Every “Clickety click, clickety click” is another two humans being burned. How many would that be if I don’t go to sleep at all? Let’s think. Two a second, so… I do the maths. What? Just 75,000?! That’s not even 1% of the victims of the Holocaust! So many lives, so many murders; I could sit up all night, two murders per second, and it’s less than 1% of the total?
Though some people did, against all the odds, survive.
Years into the future, I will be on a train in Poland and get chatting to one of my fellow travellers. He’ll turn out to be on his honeymoon, though he lives in New Zealand. Nice chap. It’ll turn out that his great-grandad was part of the Sobibor rebellion; one of just 50 to survive of the 200,000 sent to Sobibor.
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Do you know about the Sobibor rebellion? On 14th October 1943, the camp’s Jewish workers executed an escape plan that actually worked (the vast majority of escape plans did not). My companion’s great-granddad was the one who cut the telegraph lines. Otherwise my companion would never have been born.
I drag myself away from the compulsive sight of the railway tracks receding, and return to my compartment. “Clickety click”. It’s time for bed. My stomach still feels heavy with grief for people I’ll never meet.
The next morning, I look out of the window for my first sight of Poland. Do you know why the death camps were in Poland? It’s because there were so many Jews in Poland. And do you know why? It’s because they’d been so welcome there.
In 1334, Kazimierz the Great passed a law prohibiting persecution of Jews. Later that century, when Jews throughout Europe were being blamed for the Black Death, thousands moved in search of protection, which they received. Kazimierz also formed an alliance with Lithuania, which gradually became the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As a result, there were also many Jews in Lithuania. When the war broke out, there were 100 synagogues in Vilnius. Today, there’s just one. There’s no need for the other 99; their worshippers were taken to the Ponary Forest (just six miles out of town) and murdered.
To be honest, I don’t think I’ve woken up in a better frame of mind than I went to bed, though the sleeper train has worked its magic and we’re nearly at the end of our trip. Many Holocaust victims would be on their trains for ten or more days and nights, often without food or water. Many died on the journey.
Not that arrival was really something to look forward to. In 1944, a surge in Hungarian Jewish arrivals by train at Auschwitz meant the crematoria could not cope, so some bodies had to be burned in open-air pits, like in the Ponary Forest. Otto Moll, the SS man in charge of the crematoria, ordered a naked woman to dance and sing on top of the pile of corpses to be burned. Then he shot her and burned the bodies. He would throw children onto the fire alive.
The two things about the holocaust that I find unbearable (other than the outcome: roughly 11 million human beings murdered, including six million Jews) are the combination of bureaucratic organisation and unspeakable sadism.
The Auschwitz survivor Edith Eger would later describe witnessing a pregnant woman having her legs tied together when it came time for her to deliver her child. Edith would be in multiple extermination camps until the very end and be part of the death marches that followed; but she never witnessed agony like that again.
This sadism was set up in the service of an organised state.
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One of the early Nazi experiments with mass murder was a van that would drive around gassing the mentally ill. The van had a channel in the floor to drain the patients’ vomit. Someone designed that! Someone thought about what would happen, realised the patients would vomit as they died and came up with a carefully-engineered solution.
We arrive into Kraków.
We’re staying in the beautiful Kazimierz area. It is the old Jewish quarter, though, of course, there are no Jews left.
We try to have a nice time - drinking cherry vodka and exploring one of Europe’s most beautiful cities.
No, I’m being unfair - we do have a nice time, even if we both feel somewhat haunted by those that once lived in the houses that now form the B&B and bars we spend our time in.
But - two days later - it is time to follow them on their last journey: the train ride to Auschwitz.
Many books have contributed to this series, but this chapter particularly draws on Laurence Rees’s The Holocaust.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit historyofeuropein75trainjourneys.substack.com
