I’m not really sure why I wanted to go to Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp in Poland – it was not the most obvious place to go for an Easter break!
But it was something more than just morbid curiosity. I wanted to try to understand the reality of the mechanistic killing of over a million Jews which took place there and to explore my own reactions when confronted with the hideous reality of genocide.
Born in 1942, I grew up in a small provincial town in the East Midlands. Although the Second World War was very real for us – surrounded as we were by American Air Force bases – the enormity of the Holocaust didn’t really enter our consciousness until well into the 1950s. And it was not taught or talked about during my Grammar school years right up to 1960.
