Rooney stood transfixed in front of the picture. So did his fellow
England
team-mates Andy Carroll, Phil Jagielka, Jack Butland, Joe Hart, Theo Walcott
and Leighton Baines in the Auschwitz Museum.
Roy Hodgson, his close friend Avram Grant and the Football Association
chairman David Bernstein, whose father escaped from the Nazis, stared at the
picture. Thilo’s arrogant stance, the way he was casually pointing an
elderly Jew towards his death, symbolised the Final Solution.
“There was the guy who made all the decisions, whether they lived or died,”
said Rooney, talking on the team bus after the seven players’ visit to this
hell on earth. “He’s probably gone home after that, listened to music, and
had dinner with his family as if nothing had happened. It’s crazy. It’s hard
to understand.
“I’m a parent and it’s tough to see what happened there. You’ve seen the
amount of children who died. You see the children’s clothes and shoes, it’s
really sad. You have to see it first hand.”
From November 1942 until October 1944, Thilo was often the duty doctor on the
ramp as the trains pulled in from all over Europe. “Look at the body
language of the German officer,’’ said Grant. “It’s just a normal day at
work. This photograph disturbs me more than any other here.”
Fifteen members of Grant’s family perished in Auschwitz. He returns every year
for the March of the Living, and the picture of Thilo blithely ruling on the
fates of innocents remains with him always.
A dignified figure, Grant had joined the players at their elegant Krakow
hotel, the Stary, for this voyage into the heart of darkness.
They climbed aboard the team bus for the 50km drive. Some looked out of the
window, watching the Polish countryside flash past. Baines read his William
Boyd. There was none of the noise or banter associated with footballers
aboard coaches.
They set the right, respectful tone throughout. On arriving at Auschwitz, they
were met by their guide, Wojciech Smolen, and they hung on his every word
for three hours. They walked under the gate cruelly claiming that Arbeit
Macht Frei. “Pure irony,’’ Smolen explained.
Grant talked with Rooney, observing: “The Nazis were very clever. They gave
you hope.’’ And then killed you, up to 1.5 million here.
Rooney, absorbed throughout, paused to read the sign on entering the museum:
“The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again.’’
Revealing far more hinterland as a person that hitherto perceived, Rooney
added: “What happened here puts football into perspective. It’s good for us
to try to understand this history.
“I did history at school but never really appreciated it at the time, so I
wanted to understand more about what happened in the War. I watched the
documentary The World At War last year, the night before away matches in
Europe, and a lot of it is about what happened at Auschwitz. So I wanted to
see it first hand.’’
So he listened to Smolen talk of how the Jews were taken to Auschwitz.
“These people were told they were simply leaving for a while to live in East
Europe,’’ said Smolen. “Mothers were told to take toys for their children.
Craftsmen were told to take their tools. They believed they would be
returning in a few years. So they asked friends and neighbours to keep an
eye on their properties. But for the SS, these people would die.’’
Walcott looked at the haunting photograph of a group of women arriving at
Birkenau, one of them staring straight at the camera, total confusion in her
eyes.
Carroll listened attentively as Smolen told how the unwitting Jews were
ushered towards the gas chambers.
Bernstein shook his head in disgust as Smolen related how prisoners were
ordered “to memorise the number of the hook” they hung their clothes on
before entering the “showers”. “The intention was to deceive up to the very
last moment,” said Smolen.
These strong sportsmen, their worlds built around self-belief, found it tough.
Hart needed a few moments to look pensively out of the window, inhaling
deeply, after walking through the rooms crammed with the shoes, hair,
glasses and household items.
As a father of two young children, Jagielka turned away, the emotion in his
eyes, as he looked at a suitcase belonging to Petr Eisler, a two year-old,
whose life was snuffed out by the evil likes of Thilo.
Jagielka, one of the squad’s most thoughtful individuals, has Polish ancestry
and was deeply affected by all he saw. So many suitcases, their names still
clear of Klara Fochtmann, Herman Pasternak, Benjamin Lazarus as well as poor
Eisler. Bernstein kept shaking his head.
When the players then walked into the grim, bricked structure housing the gas
chambers and ovens, Jagielka read aloud the sign by the door.
“You are entering a building where the SS murdered thousands of people,”
recited Jagielka.
Smolen continued: “They were told to take off their clothes. Some were given
soap to give the impression that were going into showers. Then the Zyklon B
was dropped in and in 20 minutes they were dead.’’ As Smolen spoke, Carroll
looked up, instinctively pointing to the hole in the roof in disbelief.
“The Zonder Kommando came in and cleared the bodies out,’’ added Smolen. “They
shaved the hair and pulled the teeth out. The bodies were then burnt in a
furnace. Sometimes there were so many bodies, they took them outside and
burned them there.’’
Outside the chamber that claimed so many of his relatives, Grant gave a short
but emotional speech to the players. “It’s very important you came here;
it’s so good that you came here. It’s important to talk about this and
spreads the message of what happened here.’’
Climbing back in the coach, the players were then driven to Birkenau, to the
industrial-level killing fields. Jagielka walked and talked, unable to
absorb the sheer enormity of events that had occurred in this patch of
Godforsaken land. All the players stopped at the “selection”, working out
where Thilo had been pointing. Butland kept checking the direction,
imagining the line of condemned humanity stretching towards the four gas
chambers at the end by the birch trees from which Birkenau takes its name.
Hart wanted to know whether any had tried to escape. The guide pointed to
the watchtowers, where SS guards would just pick off any one who stepped out
of line.
Yards away, Grant stood where his forefathers had spent their last minutes on
earth, and related a story to Rooney and Carroll. “Over there are the
changing rooms,” he said, “not for football but to die”.
Rooney looked at the huts that once housed so much misery. “You don’t realise
how those who lived there to work managed without food, without water. It’s
a form of torture and then they died. The others got murdered.’’
Then came a very moving ceremony. Hodgson and Bernstein put on skull caps, lit
candles and placed them gently on the railway tracks that had carried so
many cargoes of pain.
“Everyone should come here to understand what happened,” said Hodgson.
His players will never forget Dr Thilo. They will never forget their visit to
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“We will speak of what we have seen,” Rooney promised. “If that helps a few
more people to understand what happened at Auschwitz then that’s good. It
will never be forgotten.”
Since
then, the racist street movement has been dogged by splits and internal
fighting, with one faction known as the “Infidels” distributing a
leaflet that accused EDL leader Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen
Yaxley-Lennon) of being a “pedophile” after he described a 15-year-old
Muslim woman as “fit” on his twitter account.