Rememberance in stones

As you walk around the camp you will see at the side of the tracks a railway carriage. It is the same as the carriages that transported the camp inmates to Birkenau.

The carriage is there thanks to Frank Lowy, a Holocaust survivor and son of Hugo Lowy — a Hungarian Jew who was beaten to death by the Birkenau guards when he refused to give up his tallit and tefillin.

He helped to bring the restored wartime railway carriage to Birkenau in 2009 and it now serves as a memorial to the half million Hungarian Jews who died there.

Wooden, with no windows and very little ventilation, the carriage tells its own sad story. Hundreds of people were crammed into each carriage, sometimes in sweltering heat, other times in the bitterest cold.

People were bought into the camp from hundreds of miles away, from all corners and the farthest reaches of the Nazi empire. Little wonder that hundreds of them died during the journey.

The carriage is covered in hundreds of rocks and stones. This made little sense to me at the time but I later learnt that in Jewish cemetries and on graves they do not leave flowers as they are transitory and for the living.

Instead they leave stones. A far more lasting memorial to loved ones.