When you learn about the Holocaust in school, they tell you the facts and the figures.

They tell you about Anne Frank. You might hear about Corrie Ten Boom.

You get a lesson on Krystalnacht. You understand the jews had to wear stars and were hated. You may even know why.

But thats not anything on the story that should be told.

Its strange how one seminar completely re-opened my eyes. I assumed I was pretty savvy with the whole idea of it, I was intruiged by how evil could become so prominent, and years ago did a hell of alot of my own research. I knew the things I said above, in great detail. I knew about Auschwitz, I understood the segregation, I read books about people's experiences.

But it was never really all that personal until yesterday.

As part of the Letters From Auschwitz seminar that happened yesterday, we spoke to a Holocaust survivor. Not even that, but an Auschwitz and death march survivor.

She was astounding. Like you wouldn't be able to comprehend.

There are two reasons I find her particularly amazing.

One is her story itself. She began as a Polish child in a ghetto, living her life sneaking through sewage tunnels to try to scrounge some bread from the non-jewish side. When it got worse, she and her family tried several times to escape. And when I say several, I mean it, she was attempting to flee into Russia, and she said it must have been about 5 times the tried. She lived for a while in the woods, the thick woods, just wishing they wouldnt be seen or heard, and avoiding wolves.
They went back in the end, to the Ghetto, and got some false papers from a Catholic preist they had long since befriended. They split up, several splits in her family, and she and her mother escaped to work in a munitions factory, if I remember rightly.
But she got betrayed. She and her mother refused to admit anything, but they were interrogated, and told they were going to die.
They were lined up against the wall, watching a man with a shotgun. Within a few minutes, they heard mass gunshots. They'd fired blanks. Did you think it would be that easy? They asked. They then sent her to auschwitz. She was 16.

She was lucky, if thats truely the word. She got a job in Kanada.
Kanada was the cruelly ironicly named sorting house for the belongings of the newly arrived, and newly dead prisoners. They called it Kanada, because they beleived Canada was a place of money and wealth.
It meant that she would have to sort through the deads clothes, jewellry, belongings.
It protected her. They got a far better treatment, and were able to steal food from the dead's pockets to sustain them longer.

Soon, her mother heard that Kittys group would be exterminated. She risked her life, and threw herself in the path of the Kommandant, and asked bravely that her daughter be spared.
It is this bravery, and her german, which meant he obliged.

They were evacuated soon after this, as the Allied Forces were approaching. She was forced into a train, an airtight, foodless and waterless train. She survived, only by creating a crack in the floorboards which her and her mother took turns in breathing from.

Then came the death march. 3 months of walking as the trains would take them no further. The cold and the snow. No shoes, little food, no water. Nothing given to them, everything taken.

It was six months after Auschwitz was liberated, that Kitty and her mother were finally free.


Its incredible. She had to live through so damn much that she should've had to, and she was my age. Younger even, when it all began. And she's so strong!

Thats my second reason for my awe of her. She is so strong. SO strong. We watched a film she made, her return to Auschwitz for the first time. You watched her break as she remembered things, weep- and within five seconds, compose herself, and continue explaining her previous point.
She showed her son the place where she stayed, explained how she had slept in her first night next to a dead body. How she'd had to hide beneath a mattress to avoid being noticed. How she would have to stand outside in the cold and the snow for hours for registration twice a day, which could not end until everyone was found. How she lived in the same clothes for months on end, because the second you took them off, someone would take them, and you'd have none. How she had to steal from the dead, because that was the only way to survive. How she suddenly realised what the showers truely were and how she could do nothing but continue. How she heard people being burned alive, when there were too many for the gas chambers.
And because she thought people should know about it, she let people see that. She explained her humiliation, she didn't sensor anything, but was entirely honest throughout. She showed her son the ashes of the burned, found chips of bone still within them.

Auschwitz made her like this.
People, who decided against the jewish, did these things to her.

In psychology, I do about how people can do evil things. In philosophy, I do what brings evil into the world. In english, I read how evil can progress. And in history I see what it did.
None, answer my questions of how.

For Psychology I watched a doccumentary called The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.
American soldiers tortured Iraq suspects.
People who had a car like the one a suspect may have had.
They ritually humilated them.
Okay- so they didn't exterminate them. But the prison was open for a few years, and it took that long for true concerns to be raised.
It was in 2003.

Seventy odd years after the holocaust, horrible, horrible, things still happen all the time.
This is why such things scare me so much.