The never born

How do we approach the magnitude of genocide, and recognise the scale of the loss?

For many years, I have led visits to sites of the Holocaust in Europe. Teacher groups from the Imperial War Museum and UCL Centre for Holocaust Education have journeyed to Lithuania and to Poland to see the mass graves of the forest of Ponar, where tens of thousands were shot into pits, or traces of the death camp of Treblinka, where some 900,000 Jewish men, women and children were murdered in gas chambers. They walk the streets of the former Warsaw ghetto, where not long-ago starved corpses littered the ground or visit the Radegast railway station in Lodz, from where trainloads of thousands were deported to the death camp of Chelmno. They walk under the gateway into Auschwitz-Birkenau, enter its wooden barracks, stand at the ruins of its gas chambers and crematoria.

The burden

At each place, we try to find the individuals in the masses of the dead, we look upon their family photographs from time before the Holocaust, tell stories of who they were and who they loved, explore how they responded even as the genocide unfolded – try to give them back their faces and names and agency. Try to find some measure of the loss.

Such days take their toll. The teachers carry a heavy emotional burden as they struggle to grasp the magnitude of a continent-wide genocide, and they do so to better communicate its significance to their own students, back in the classroom.

In Krakow, they are given a little relief from the weight of this history, if only for a short time. Standing outside a children’s playground they are challenged get every piece of apparatus played on at the same time – the roundabout needs to be spinning, climbing frames, swings and slides all in use in order to stop the clock that will record how long they take.

And yet we play

Hesitant, uncertain looks quickly give way to a competitive spirit as the stopwatch is started and they race inside, eager to beat the best time of previous groups. Grown adults shout and laugh as they dash about, swinging, balancing, climbing, and sliding. Eagerly they cry out for the watch to stop, as soon as everyone in the group is off the ground, and all items in the playground are in motion.

And then we look around.

For the first time, they notice their surroundings. And then they see the wall, with its distinctively shaped crenulation, resonant of Jewish tombstones, and realise that they are playing alongside a remnant of the wall that enclosed the Jewish ghetto.

A place, today, where schoolchildren from Krakow still run and play as of course they must, as life goes on, after all. But who else should be playing on these swings, we ask? And we approach the full scale of the loss in a way that we do not quite grasp when standing at the edge of the mass grave, or the ruins of the crematoria.

Because not only were 90% of all Jewish children in German-occupied Europe murdered during the Second World War, their children and grandchildren, the generations that should have followed, were never born.

Image of playground by Olivia Hemingway.