Can't Smell No Holocaust Gas At Auschwitz?

Englishman David Irving creates headlines as a holocaust denier posing as an historian.

By sheer coincidence, Colonel & Juanita Juan have just returned from a visit to Auschwitz. Below is the Colonel's report. Written as an apology to Poland for Irving's offensive and unpardonable activities. And a guide to others who might, one day, follow the trail to visit the infamous Death Camp..

I didn't exactly plan a trip to Auschwitz. Although I knew I was soon to be relatively close. Like a few hundred miles away.

It was early September and I'd arrived to spend three weeks in and around Lviv, capital of the Western Ukraine.

Lviv is beautiful. Take my word for it. A dilapidated, crumbling, fascinating drop-dead gorgeous gem of a city. Cobbled streets. Trams. Glorious architecture. Krakow, eat your heart out (sorry Poland).

Except there's no need to apologise to the Poles.

Because Lviv was once one of theirs. Part of Poland. As it was once part of Germany when it was called Lemberg. As it was also once part of the Communist Soviet Empire, going under the Russian name of Lvov or Lwow.

For Lviv is a place that has unluckily straddled one of the greatest political fault-lines to have ever divided Europe.

Over hundreds of years, whenever the tectonic plates have shifted, Lviv has been a city that has learned what it's like to wake up one morning and discover someone else is in charge.

As happened several times over, in the run-up and aftermath of WW2.

First, in the 1930's it was a Polish city. Then, in 1939 it was taken over by Stalin under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. At which point Ukrainian dissidents, nationalists and intellectuals were rounded-up and murdered by the thousand.

Until July 1941. When Hitler's Nazi Germany invaded. And remained for three long years. The period this article is about. A time never to be forgotten.

These were the years of the Holocaust. The so-called 'Final Solution' to the Jewish problem. The darkest hours of mankind's existence on planet Earth.

Back to my holiday.

A few days in, with me in desperate need of a glass of Georgian Red wine, we stumbled on a fascinating restaurant called 'Under the Golden Rose'. Inside was a TV screen showing newsreel of Lviv in the 1930s. It turned out to be a Jewish restaurant. And we were eating and drinking on the site of the Golden Rose Synagogue. Which had been burned down by the Nazis in 1943.

Everything about Lviv suddenly began to make sense. Obvious! The rest quickly fell into place as we remembered our history.

In the 1930's this place was riddled with Polish Jews. As we watched the TV screen and drank our wine we understood we were sitting right in the heart of Holocaust country. From which over 300,000 people had been deported to Auschwitz alone.

Inside Lviv and in every town around, are signs of the old Jewish ghettos. Immaculate memorial gardens with fresh flowers and hundreds of names carved in granite. It's a land where pilgrims, particularly Americans, come to honour their murdered ancestors.

A few days later, just as hundreds of thousands did nearly seventy years previously, me and my 20 year old daughter boarded the midnight sleeper train to Krakow en route to Oswiecim and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

We were to return. They didn't!

There's no ideal way to visit Auschwitz. It isn't a happy place. So a visit isn't meant to be fun. Neither should it be.

In that mood, we were glad to be suffering the minor discomforts of an ancient Soviet style overnight train. One should suffer a bit, we thought.

Far more appropriate than taking a City break to Krakow, staying at a 5 star hotel, then catching one of the numerous plush coaches that offer return tourist tours to the Death Camp with breakfast included!

Particularly for us non Jews. What better way of showing our respect than to arrive by train. Keeping up ancient traditions.

So, after surviving attempted blackmail by a Ukrainian border guard and a fractured few hours sleep, we spilled out at dawn into the main square of sleepy Krakow.

Three hours later, after a hotel breakfast and a quick wash, we were off again. On the two hour train journey through Eastern Poland that would finally take us to Oswiecim - the remote village the Nazis called Auschwitz. Quite literally, the end of the line!

We talked. A brilliant 20 year old university student with her old man, raised in London suburbia during the baby-boom years immediately after the war.

As I watched the birch forests rushing past, I tried to tell her what this adventure was about. In reality, she knew it all too well. So we shared our thoughts. About Racism. Bigotry. Bullying. Intolerance. Sadists. Communism. Fascism. Pig ignorance. Nick Griffin. The BNP. Holocaust denial. Europe today.

And we remembered Brecht's chilling warning about Adolf Hitler: particularly the final words of his play The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui - [i]"The Bitch That Bore Him Is Still On Heat!"[/i]

Nothing prepares you for Auschwitz-Birkenau. It doesn't matter how much you've read. Or how many documentaries you've watched. Being there is different.

But not for everyone!

There are those who rush about. Pushing prams. Out on a day trip from Krakow. Having seen the castle and cathedral and now with time to spare before the plane home.

Pointing their mobile phone cameras at gas chambers. Or yard after yard of human hair. Whizzing past piles of long forgotten shoes. Staring blankly at a massive pile of pre-war artificial limbs. Gawping at chimneys down which cans of Zyklon-B were emptied onto countless unsuspecting souls waiting for a shower. Photos of naked women and children. Striped uniforms stained with blood and much else beyond description. Passing a walled room without so much as a twitch - a room with just enough space for four bodies to stand up when they are squeezed tightly together. Before the door is closed. Forever.

Having their photo taken - smiling happily in front of the famous sign saying 'Work Makes You Free'. Or on the rail platform at Birkenau with a background view down to the infamous 'Gate of Death'. Looking for bullet holes at the horrendous wall, before which thousands of tottering skeletons stood for a final time. Before a bored Nazi with a smoking gun pulled the trigger.

But no. That's not fair.

Perhaps this is their way of trying to comprehend something so bestial, so barbaric that it's way beyond natural 21st Century understanding.

A modern, semi-detached, TV generation's reaction to something so far removed from the X Factor that it's way beyond the imagination. Anyway. Who am I to say? And who am I to condemn?

Anna showed us round. A Polish mother of two who wouldn't be alive today had not an SS guard in 1943 accepted a gold watch from her grandfather as a bribe that saved her grandma from the cattle-train to Birkenau.

We were lucky. Anna was a marvellous guide who knew her facts. The only thing that worried me was that she kept going on and on justifying the very things we could clearly see with our own eyes.

So much so that eventually I asked her:

"Anna. Why do you keep on trying to substantiate what you're showing us? We can all see it. We believe it happened. Why are you taking such trouble to legitimize the history of Auschwitz? Are you really that concerned about Neo-Nazi Holocaust denial?"

"Yes", she replied.

"They're out there everywhere. They'll never go away. Which is the main reason for our Museum."

Which takes us back to the exact place we began.

With bogus English historian David Irving.

And the whispering ashes of countless murder victims, scattered anywhere and everywhere across this chilling landscape in a secluded corner of Eastern Poland.