AHS 19.03.1945
“If there is one thought that stands out in the human mind upon seeing these cemeteries for the first time and gazing over a sea of thousands of small white head stones, it is that all these men did not die as soldiers, they did not die fighting for their lives, they did not die fighting for their king or country - they died as Prisoners of War, they died in miserable squalor, in filth, starving, ill, beaten, diseased and treated as slaves. In these conditions their lives were burnt out, they stood no chance against the evil and black hearted enemy who were their tormentors.
“This was the fate of these hundreds and thousands of young men in their prime, condemned to lie forever in the scorched baked earth in far off lands. They lie in peace, in beautifully maintained cemeteries lovingly cared for by local gardeners. But the thought remains, they should never have died, they were young men given no chance and yet their country has never honoured them.
“May the cemeteries that guard these broken bodies be blessed for they have in their care the divine souls of our fathers and brothers. We, the Children and Families of the Far East Prisoners of War, will remember them forever.”
- Carol Cooper, COFEPOW
After much indecision, I ended up at the Imperial War Museum yesterday. In the end I didn’t go to the NFT as well, largely because their website was down in the morning so I couldn’t book tickets. Instead, after the museum I popped up to Waterstones on Oxford Street to grab a few guidebooks and maps of Athens and Samos.
I managed to see two exhibitions (well, 1 3/4) yesterday.
Great Escapes is a temporary exhibition telling the stories behind the stories of some of the escape attempts by Allied soldiers from German Prisoner of War camps during the Second World War. After contrasting the mythology with the reality of life for POWs, the exhibition focusses on the escapes made famous by the films The Wooden Horse, The Great Escape and The Colditz Story.
It is well presented and well worth the £5 entrance fee - certainly it will cause you to re-evaluate what you thought you knew about the escapes. Apparently, for example, the whole motorbike sequence in The Great Escape is complete fiction - it was only added to the movie because Steve McQueen was an accomplished motorbike rider!
The second, contrasting in tone, exhibition was the museum’s permanent Holocaust Exhibition. This occupies a vast area on the museum’s newly renovated second and third floors. I say newly renovated, but it was actually opened in 2000. That just shows how long its been since I last visited.
The exhibition is almost another museum in itself. Tracing the history of The Holocaust from the situation in Germany at the end of the First World War, Hitler’s rise to power, the establishing of the Ghettos through to the concentration camps and on to the Nuremberg trials and beyond, its too much to take in on one viewing.
Highlight is the wrong word, but one stand out part of the exhibition for me was a scale model of Auschwitz showing the victims’ walking to their deaths - only the model, taking up a whole room in itself, represents only a small strip of the camp.
Throughout the exhibition you are accompanied by Holocaust survivors telling their story through video and audio. With testimony as powerful as theirs, it is hard to understand why there are people who try to deny the Holocaust ever happened or did any real damage.
Take for example the story of a young girl who witnessed her friend being shot in front of her, just because she failed to step down from the pavement onto the road as a group of Nazi soldiers approached. Or the woman who was ravaged by dogs because she was too ill to turn up when the camp roll call took place.
If you’re ever up in town and want to re-evaluate or simply want to find out more about the Holocaust, I highly recommend a visit to the Imperial War Museum.