General meeting of the International Auschwitz Committee and a special „Meeting of the generations” in Oswiecim

When you arrived in Birkenau, you had no idea of the horrors. You felt something, noticed something. Now, everyone knows that people were gassed, but we couldn't conceive of that. We walked about with the feeling that it just couldn't be true. You could smell it, but you just didn't take in what you were really smelling. When we were marched into the camp after the numbers were tattooed on our arms, there were women there who recognised relatives, and made gestures of dismay, as if to say, how awful that they've caught you too. While we were in quarantine, we heard two kinds of story: there were women who tried to comfort us by saying that it wasn't all that bad. Others said: "You don't leave here alive. The only way out is up those chimneys." But you just couldn't bring yourself to believe that.

I knew what I was going to see in the Auschwitz exhibition: those heaps of spectacles, hairbrushes, artificial limbs and suitcases. But when I saw them, it hit me that each scruffy hairbrush meant a person's life — a person murdered just like that, sometimes before they even had the chance to really live.

My brother was ahead of me. He got number 116; and Troop Captain Stachowicz was given number 117. I got number 118. The list for our transport started with Stanislav Ryniak, number 31, and ended with Ignacy Plachta, number 758.After those formalities, the Kapos drove us... to the roll-call ground, where we had to line up in 5 rows... Hauptsturmführer Frizsch announced: "This is Auschwitz Concentration Camp... Any resistance or disobedience will be ruthlessly punished. Anyone disobeying superiors, or trying to escape, will be sentenced to death. Young and healthy people don't live longer than three months here. Priests one month, Jews two weeks. There is only one way out — through the crematorium chimneys". With this revelation of our prospects, began our first day in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

At the moment of leaving childhood behind, this journey to the heart of the unbearable and of human madness enabled me totake a large step towards maturity, and to confront day-to-dayproblems with a more critical spirit. In an age when information reigns, our society is every day flooded by images of violence coming from all over the world, which risk leading to familiarization and, finally, indifference. They should, on the contrary, revolt us and push us to action.