Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorating genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, Sudan, as well as the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust. As a schoolchild I was not yet made aware of the facts surrounding the Shoah and even at a highly politicised time at university I knew few facts about it.

A friend of Jewish Czech heritage brought back from a nation, then still stuck behind the iron curtain, drawings originally smuggled out of a concentration camp (Theresienstadt?) by a family member. The drawings later formed part of an exhibition of Konzentrationslager art giving harrowing insights into life in those bestial institutions.

In the summer of 2001 my Honda Transalp bike and I found ourselves near that most splendid of Polish cities: Cracow. Meeting up with a group of bikers at a campsite a little way outside the city we compared notes and one of the bikers said “we’re quite near Oświęcim”.

That name, translated in German is Auschwitz, and, as any sentient human knows, it is the site of one of the most horrible killing machines in the history of (in)humanity.

The following day I visited both Auschwitz and Birkenau. I climbed up into the entrance watchtower made famous in the film “Schindler’s List”. No-one else was there. I looked out onto to the vast flatness of the camp – most of the barracks had vanished but their foundations remained to show how huge the camp had been. In the far right-hand corner I could make out the mangled ruins of the crematorium blown up by the camp officials when they abandoned it in the face of the Russian army’s advance. Strange feelings of desolation, utter emptiness, and complete annihilation assaulted me. I had to get out and rushed down the stairs silently screaming.

Yet so many never got out….

Afterwards I went for a walk around the camp perimeter. A family was picnicking near the interminable stretch of barbed wire fence. I walked into a little wood.

AUSCHWITZ 2001

Ash pond reflects clouds

silence by the little wood

a stork takes to flight.

Twisted iron bars

concrete minds

rusty furnaces:

Resurrection’s castle

Is a heap of crumbling concrete…

Holocaust Remembrance Day was designated by the general assembly of the United Nations in 2005. January 27th was chosen because it was the day Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by allied troops.

In our part of the world, the Mediavalle and the Garfagnana areas of Lucca province, the Todt organization built bunkers, casements, tunnels and anti-tank walls to halt the allied advance up the Italian peninsula. In the Serchio valley and the surrounding mountains around three thousand people are estimated to have worked in the service of Todt for a period of twelve months. The Todt organization had its administrative headquarters in the Santini palace building at Borgo a Mozzano, now the town’s public library.

Many workers were Italian army deserters from the armistice of 8th September 1943 since they were promised they would not be deported to German concentration camps if they worked on building the Gothic line defences. Others were forced labourers, captured during raids and subsequently detained for transportation to Auschwitz at the local concentration camp at Socciglia near Anchiano.

Today that area is an industrial estate and also the place where the Sagra del Bacalà (Norwegian cod festival) takes place at the beginning of May each year to commemorate a happier event, that of the twinning of nearby Anchiano with Aalesund in Norway – not forgetting, too, that Norway was also subject to the Nazi scourge and has its own victims to mourn.

On the Brennero route to Lucca from Bagni di Lucca a commemoration stone, dedicated to the majority of those victims who never returned, has been erected on the site of the camp. (Trans: ‘This place has known the inhuman sufferings of patriots and rounded-up civilians waiting to be deported to Germany or to a more tragic fate. We entrust this memory to new generations so that they might follow decisively the paths of peace.’)

Let us fully remember the significance of this day and may we never believe that these events are an endemic part of the human race and that there is nothing we can do about it. That contaminated thought is tantamount to us giving up hope in all that we hold most dear in our lives – life itself. May indifference perish!