Paul Calvert hears Clive Urquhart's reflections on his time at Schindler's factory and Auschwitz-Birkenau

Auschwitz-Birkenau was where the Germans held Polish political prisoners. From the spring of 1942 Auschwitz became the largest site for the murder of Jews brought under the Nazi plan for their extermination. More than 1,100,000 men, women, and children lost their lives there. In contrast Oskar Schindler is credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories, one of which was in Poland. Clive Urquhart, Pastor of Kingdom Faith in Horsham recently visited both sites and Paul Calvert spoke with him to find out more.

Paul: What was it like for you visiting Schindler's factory?

Clive: I think going to Schindler's factory was actually quite a message of hope. Although the context of where it was was very, very negative, what he did, saving the amount of people that he did from what would have been death, was actually a massive story of hope for those people. I think in the context of where the factory was and then just down the road, obviously with the death camps, the fact that some were saved out of that scenario was amazing. It's a very stark reality to what people were going through, but the fact that he managed to save some was a real story of hope.

Paul: He's become a hero for rescuing Jews. How did he save the Jews?

Clive: Obviously he managed to set up a company, a business and get an agreement with the guys running the camps to take some of the people out of there, to give them jobs on the basis that they were, in quotes, helping the Nazi cause. Obviously he was secretly just getting them out of the death camps so that he could give them jobs and hopefully keep them alive till the war was over so that they could be freed and rescued. It was a whole undercover operation that I think did an amazing job.

Paul: Did he actually know that these people were going to the death camps?

Clive: Yeah I think so. I think there were a lot of Germans that were moving into the area around, because a lot of people just thought this is going to become a new part of Germany, so they were bringing Germans in to live in that area. I think he found out and understood what was really going on.

Paul: You also visited concentration camps. Which ones did you visit?

Clive: We visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, so there's two parts to it. One is the labour camp and the other one is the death camp. The labour camp obviously started at the end of the thirties at the beginning of the war. The Birkenau, which is the death camp, which is a couple of miles up the road, that was built during the early part of the Second World War and that was basically built to get the Jews from all over Europe there, to kill them.

Paul: What was the mood like as you went in and visited this place?

Clive: I think Birkenau, the death camp, when you first go, we went into a tower and looked over the whole site and it's very quiet. You don't hear any birds singing or anything. There is a certain feel of - something significant has taken place here and there's still the lingering after effects, if you like. Then walking round and going into the various huts that were built: some of them were accommodation, some of them were where they had to work. It's just the whole conditions, how they were treated. It was as if they were treated as if they were not people, but they were more like animals. I think for us, the stark reality of the systematic killing machine that the Nazis were at that time and they literally just wanted to annihilate a whole people group.

Paul: The gas chambers are where a lot of them were murdered. Did you get the chance to walk into the gas chambers?

Clive: There aren't any gas chambers there as such now. There are remains of them because when the Nazis realised they were going to lose the war, they blew them up; they bombed them themselves. There are still the remains and you can see the initial room - there are four of them at that site - four gas chambers. There was an initial area where they took them in, where they all undressed and then there was the next room where they all thought they were going to have showers and that's where they actually then gassed them. Then from there their bodies were dragged into another area where they were just put into furnaces, to basically destroy, in quotes, the evidence of what they'd done.

Paul: What was the trip like for you? Did it change your attitude when you left?