by Sofia Papadopoulou
When Rosa passed through the iron-barred gate of Auschwitz, her deep blue gaze was "stormed" by what she saw on the back side of the "gate of hell". With a heavy step, unable to put her thoughts in order and express in words the feelings that overwhelmed her at that moment, she began to walk side by side with Dora and Olympia, almost mechanically following the guide between the dim buildings with the blood-stained history.
"I was speechless. It was scary... It's not something you can manage "just"", explained a short time later, speaking to the Athens/Macedonian News Agency, the 16-year-old student of the 7th Lyceum of Thessaloniki, who together with her classmates experienced a "life experience »: the visit to the camp - hell of the death machine of the Third Reich.
Winning the sixth place in the student competition for creating a short film (video), on the theme "The Holocaust and the Greek Jews", organized by the General Secretariat of Religions of the Ministry of Education and Religion and the Jewish Museum of Greece, was the one that gave the Rosa Mati, The Papavasilei gifts and Olympia Sapunidou the possibility to visit at the beginning of last July the place, which became synonymous with martyrdom and tortures that the human mind cannot contain.
"I didn't think I was there. When I got inside and started to realize where I was, my stomach started to get sick. It's then that you understand that everything we had learned about the Holocaust had really happened," recalls Dora, With the Rosa adds: "We certainly had a knowledge of what happened there, but it was not what we thought we would see. It was something we didn't expect..."
An immense - and unanswerable - "why" she remembers stuck in her mind during the tour Olympia, who also cannot "fit" into words the emotions she felt piercing through her while listening to the tour guide talk about what tragically happened there. “It's terrible that when you look at this place, an incredibly strong feeling is awakened in you, which you don't know how to express. You start and think more, trying to answer the biggest question you have: why... Why are there such barbaric people? Why should so many people be wronged and condemned? Nobody ever understood..." he says.
About 4 to 5 hours - with a break in between - the tour of the site lasted, and the images of the crematorium or the display case with women's shaved hair, which the Germans used in .. .weaving. "What happened there was inhumane. We were in shock with what we were seeing," they say, in unison, recalling the disgust they felt for the small cells, where only someone could stand upright.
“Whatever there is in photographs and images, whatever we say now, after our visit to Auschwitz, we cannot describe the experience. It's something that everyone experiences in a different way", say the young students, with Dora confessing that every time the conversation turns around this topic "you feel again what you felt at that moment, the same feeling".. .
The "Incurable Wounds" that taught them what the Holocaust is
Rosa, Dora and Olympia, accompanied by Angelos Khotzidis, a teacher who supervised the entire process of creating the video, and Aikaterini Efraimidou, an accompanying professor at Auschwitz, had the opportunity to experience emotions like never before and to return with an even more deeply rooted the belief that in order to "NEVER AGAIN" be repeated atrocities similar to the Holocaust, all young people should learn, through the educational process, about this tragic page of world history.
"In an ideal world, all schools should be able to go on a field trip to Auschwitz," says Dora, who, as a student at an experimental school, had the opportunity to hear enough about the Holocaust from elementary school and watch several films about it. the subject in the context of the educational process.
Instead, Rosa feels grateful for the opportunity she was given to learn about the Holocaust, through the research she had to do with her classmates, for the needs of the three-minute video with the characteristic title "Healing Wounds", the experience of creating it which he did not regret for a moment, as he emphasizes. "The whole process took many days, but if I could go back in time, I wouldn't change these days, these hours... We saw many interviews, we went on the memory walk, we communicated with different people and all this was a great experience", explains the young student who believes that "if this program didn't exist, we wouldn't know all this and we wouldn't be here now".
Against the voices of anti-Semitism that sometimes rise menacingly like other "black clouds" over Europe and the rest of the world, the three schoolgirls oppose the historical events, as they experienced them through their visit to Auschwitz, but also as they recorded them in their video , through which pass testimonies of Holocaust survivors, an interview-river of the president of the Central Israelite Council and the Israelite Community of Thessaloniki, David Saltiel, and scenes of atrocity - all captured through their pure adolescent gaze.
"The Holocaust is an inhumane event, which should not have happened under any circumstances and those who started it were not human," says Dora in a stentorian voice, with Rosa adding that those who question the Holocaust should put the themselves in the place of those who experienced it" and Olympia to bring back to the discussion the intense feeling one feels when facing what the iron gate with the infamous inscription "Arbeit macht frei" hides behind it...
*Photos courtesy of Olympia Sapunidou
SOURCE: from his website ATHENS NEWS AGENCY, 8.10.2022