England players pay long visit to Auschwitz
Reuters - Friday 08 June 2012, 19:27
England forward Wayne Rooney
and several of his team-mates spent two hours in the scorching
sun at the Auschwitz death camp on Friday, finding it hard to
grasp the horrors of the largest Nazi extermination camp.
England have their Euro 2012 base in Krakow, about an hour
away from Auschwitz, where 1.5 million victims, mainly Jewish,
perished in World War II.
The players, who visited the museum after the German, Dutch
and Italian teams, spent time walking round in respectful
silence, broken by the players' questions regarding the details
of the prisoners' existence.
"It is unreal. I learned some of this stuff at school but I
could never imagine anything on this scale. It is just beyond
belief or comprehension," winger Theo Walcott said.
The players were joined by coach Roy Hodgson, English FA
chairman David Bernstein and several staff members as they
passed under the infamous "Arbeit macht frei" (Work sets one
free) sign.
"To actually come here and see it for myself is quite
humbling," said young Birmingham City goalkeeper Jack Butland.
The Auschwitz museum contains exhibits such as hair shaved
from the heads of incoming prisoners, piles of their personal
belongings as well as cans for storing Zyklon B, the
cyanide-based gas the Nazis used to exterminate inmates.
The England party went on the railway platform used to
unload prisoners locked in cattle carriages and bound for
almost-certain death, where Hodgson and Bernstein, their heads
dressed in kippas, lit two candles on the wooden rail sleepers.
Much of the Holocaust was perpetrated on Polish soil by its
war-time Nazi occupiers, nearly wiping out its entire Jewish
community of some 3.3 million people.
Poland has maintained some of the death camp facilities as a
reminder of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis on its soil.