Pizza in Auschwitz

How long is the shadow of Auschwitz?

Across the road from the entrance to Auschwitz is a pizza restaurant. Some visitors are visibly shaken that locals can grab a bit of fast food just 100 yards from where tens of thousands starved to death. For many, this discovery can seem to defile the sacred space of their pilgrimage.

But the small Polish town of Oswiecim – which the Germans renamed ‘Auschwitz’ – existed for 700 years before a Nazi concentration camp was built on its outskirts, and it has been home to thousands of people for more than 70 years since the Second World War. How should these people go about their daily lives, outside the barbed wire that encircles the former death camp, now a powerful museum and memorial?

As we climb back onto the coach, selfies snapped under the infamous sign Arbeit Macht Frei – and travel back to our homes many hundreds of miles away – it is too easy to leave the burden of Auschwitz to those who happen to live in its vicinity. People were deported to Auschwitz from Germany, Greece and Norway, from Poland, France and the Netherlands. From the Channel Islands. The Holocaust was the product of European history, culture, so-called ‘civilization’.

Across the continent, people became complicit in the murder of their neighbours. So how far does the shadow of Auschwitz reach? How far do you need to be from the gates of Auschwitz before it is okay to have that slice of pizza?