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Jennifer Bradshaw was moved to compose the following piece of writing after watching the memorial service from Auschwitz Birkenau for International Holocaust Day on January 27th 2025. She said that some of the words and phrases are those that resonated with her as she watched from the comfort of home, listening to the testaments and memories of survivors.

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I was not there

So, I will never truly know what happened

The years of fighting and attrition

The battlefields, the advancing heavy artillery and the screaming shells overhead

The fleeing crowds of women and children

And the anguish of the captured, the tortured, the persecuted

The terror of the midnight searchlights and the belligerent barking dogs

I was not there

So, I can never know firsthand the horrors that were ‘then’ in Germany and Poland;

In Czechoslovakia, in Russia and the many countries overrun by the power of military might – whether wrong or whether right,

Whether justified by circumstance, or an inevitable consequence of time and place I may learn of the events and the names of the perpetrators.

I may see through the media of print and the imagery of celluloid But I will never really know!

However, I am moved to write

in expression of my emotional response

my time-distanced and imagined cinematograph

Aided by the intimacy of archive testimony

And the words of those who were there.

It was a bitter day in January’s frost and rime

When the biting wind blew through the barbed wire at Buchenwald

And the snow piled up in icy drifts against the watchtowers of Sobibor.

From the comfort of our living places on the day

Remembered as if it were yesterday some eighty years later

We were transported

This time, by the power of televisual reality we were taken there

To the enormous iron gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau

The high black walls

To the blackened sky

And to the destination of a generation

Whose destiny was unimaginable, unfathomable and unforgivable

In that place beyond those gates.

On hearing some of the accounts of those – now old and frail – but still with memories so sharp

We could not help but be moved to the point of tears and shame

As they spoke their truths with dignity and candour, but without rancour, without bitterness and without judgement

Telling us how it was for those who were there.

They walked barefoot through the snow

But they did not cry.

They were dressed in rags

But they were not ashamed.

Their heads were shaven bare

But their sense of human dignity could not be erased.

Streaming in a shuffling queue of broken bodies

From the relative warmth of thin straw paillasses

and overcrowded wooden platform beds

From the stench of the huts

And the silence of the dying

They walked in the snow; they trailed through the mud

They dragged their tired and beaten bodies forwards

Towards the final gate; the last building; the highest chimney; the end of the road.

beyond which there would be no return.

I was not there, and so I can never begin to stand in their shoes.

The pinched and blanched faces of the children

On little bodies racked with fear as they

Straggled along the cinder path

cheek by jowl with the bared white teeth of vicious dogs

and deafened by the incessant barking voices – both animal and human.

Silently, they gripped more tightly to their mothers’ hands

But they did not run.

Where could they run to?

There was no escape from the road of sorrows

They were unflinching.

They shed no tear; they concealed their fears;

They faced their fate.

They walked in silence to the gate.

No, I was not there; not in that place, not at that time

Nor can I ever truly know nor understand it all.

But I can be a witness to that place and that time

Through the power and reality of the televisual

By the impact of the recorded word

From the virtuality of the imagery on film

From the archives and from the testament of those who were there.

So that as we live, those events in that place can never be denied;

And those who were lost to the world through those years will cast their reflection over our hearts

Their suffering will be reflected upon

Their stories will be projected into the future

They Will be remembered

And they will never be forgotten.

Jennifer K Bradshaw