munster said:
Just to bring some sense of perspective to Euro 2012 and the modern day footballer in general, brilliant article by Martin Samuel in the Mail on-line:
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/euro2012/article-2156188/Martin-Samuel-This-Auschwitz--Van-Persie-Italy-Germany-come-England-trying-right-thing.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/euro20 ... thing.html</a>
PUBLISHED: 00:12, 8 June 2012 | UPDATED: 00:15, 8 June 2012
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This morning Joe Hart will stand in goal, this afternoon he will stand in a gas chamber. Such is the challenge to the modern footballer.
At approximately 2pm, after the completion of training, a delegation of England players, coaches and staff will travel 70 kilometres west from the team base in Krakow to the town of Oswiecim, and then on to the nearby village of Brzezinka.
The world knows these locations by other names. Infamous, dreaded German translations. Auschwitz. Birkenau. The players will be taken to the wrought iron gates with the bleakly ironic legend Arbeit Macht Frei (work makes you free) and the atrocity exhibition will begin.
Immediately beyond the barbed wire, a sign informs, the corpses of the executed and tortured were displayed as a warning to new arrivals. Inside the camp, and at its sister site, more than one million died. Nobody knows the true numbers because, with slaughter on such scale, even the officious Nazis ceased keeping record.
Sad journey: Holland players Robin van Persie, Ibrahim Afellay, Nigel de Jong and Jetro Williams at Auschwitz
Another sign: ‘The people were selected on the railway platform. Those to be gassed were assured they were going to take a bath. Dummy showers were fixed to the ceiling. Cudgelled and halloed with dogs, 2000 victims were crammed into the chamber 210 square metres approximately in area. The chamber door was locked and Zyklon B was poured.
‘After 15-20 minutes the chamber was opened. Corpses were stripped of gold teeth, hair, ear-rings, rings and then transported to the crematory. Victims’ personal documents were destroyed.’
Day after day. Year after year. And it is all there. The men and women of the Holocaust Education Trust, two of whom spoke to England’s footballers about their experiences last week, go to extraordinary and noble lengths to leave a positive message of forgiveness and tolerance, but the sights of Auschwitz-Birkenau are unrelentingly sad and brutal.
The lasting memory is of the footings of makeshift wooden barracks stretching as far as the eye can see, a bald, single track train line running through the middle, the apparatus of death at journey’s end. This was the Nazis’ Final Solution and, having borne belated witness to it, as the sun fades, an air-conditioned coach will return its silent charges to the Football Association’s five-star boutique residence in the heart of Krakow’s lively centre.
The following morning the players will train again as usual, their duty done. Numbed silence is the standard response to an Auschwitz visit. When one particularly ignorant group of England Under 21 players tried to banter and mock their way around the austere brick outbuildings some years ago, their coach, an incandescent Peter Taylor, delivered a spectacular dressing down.
This time, the proper tone has been achieved following a talk given by Holocaust survivors Zigi Shipper and Ben Helfgott. When they had finished, the first hand raised to volunteer to make the visit was that of Wayne Rooney.
The gates of hell: Dutch players walk though Auschwitz's notorious entrance
Steven Gerrard talked of being able to hear a pin drop in the room. Hart left to discuss what he had heard with his father. Theo Walcott rose and embraced the two men.
Among the FA party will be chairman David Bernstein, who is Jewish, and former Chelsea manager Avram Grant, who is Israeli and lost family at Auschwitz.
Grant offered to provide context on hearing of the visit and the FA readily accepted. The finer details, however, have been a painstaking process; there is a football match to win here, after all. As late as last night, a plan to wear suits was replaced with one for polo shirts and tracksuit bottoms.
Medical staff were concerned about professional sportsmen spending so long — from departure to return is seven hours — walking in shoes so close to a game. The paths between the buildings are also very uneven. It would be easy to turn an ankle although, in the circumstances, none too wise to make a fuss about it. So a delicate balance needs to be struck. The oppressive misery that will unfold before England’s players today is hard to shake, which is why of the visiting group only Hart is likely to play on Monday.
The appalling sights are too numerous to document, but certain images are indelible. In one room are official photographs of the children of the camp. The shaven-haired boys pose almost stripped of emotion, but linger even briefly on Michalina Petrenko (Pole, 13, arrived 13 December, 1942, died August 13, 1944), and you can see she’s crying.
A minimum of 232,000 children were killed on this single site. If you’re a father, and many of these young men are, these are thoughts that are not compartmentalised in a hurry.
Stunned silence: England players listen to Holocaust survivor Zigi Shipper
One captured image depicts a group of new arrivals. There is an old woman, three mothers — one clutches a baby with an older boy by her side — a teenage girl and what may be her younger brother, staring straight into the camera. In front, three little ones walk, holding hands. The caption reads: ‘On the way to death.’
There is no uplifting coda here, no final act of redemption. They died, their bodies were burned, time moved on. Many of the guilty went unpunished. Horst Schumann, who conducted cruel sterilisation and castration experiments on inmates, often involving huge doses of burning radiation, was the head of a hospital in Sudan until 1962.
Finally captured and put on trial in 1970, he was released from prison in 1972 due to a heart condition. He lasted another 11 years, the wicked, undeserving bastard.
Jokes being the currency of dressing-room and press-room existence, often all that remains when confronted with horror is silence. The first time I visited Auschwitz, in May 1993, we filed mutely back into the hotel, to be greeted by a famous football manager, doing a commentary turn.
He asked why we looked so miserable. We told him. He broke into a grin. ‘Did you go by train?’ Nobody laughed. That night, as England floundered, many of us felt emotionally distant. It is a dangerous game the FA have played, engaging on such a powerfully human level. It cannot be predicted how an individual will react.
It was manager Roy Hodgson’s wish that the numbers be a deputation, rather than the squad in its entirety. As coach of Switzerland, he had heard first-hand from players the harrowing details of a previous visit and because of the long hours spent on board a coach, his preference was for those who were less likely to be involved against France.
Sombre: Miroslav Klose, Oliver Bierhoff, Philipp Lahm and Lukas Podolski place candles at Auschwitz as they pay their respects in memory of the victims of the Nazi regime
The Auschwitz party will include six or seven squad members, in all likelihood Rooney, Hart, Walcott, Leighton Baines, Phil Jagielka and Jack Butland, while the remainder, including captain Gerrard — who has previously visited Auschwitz — John Terry and coach Gary Neville, will tour Oskar Schindler’s factory, which has been turned into the museum of wartime Krakow.
‘It has not been a difficult debate,’ said Club England managing director Adrian Bevington. ‘What we are doing, the respect we are showing, feels right.’
England are not the first footballers to visit Auschwitz and will not be the last. Holland and Italy, who are also camped in Krakow, have already been, as have representatives of the German team, despite being based near the northern port of Gdansk.
The visits bring their own problems. The Italians were criticised for wearing tracksuits, the Germans for not sending enough players. Some argue that England are over-compensating, having been seen as distant and aloof in South Africa.
So desperate are the FA to do the right thing, it is alleged, that the psychological equilibrium of the team is placed at risk.
Yet the words of Hart, in particular, refute this. ‘The Holocaust was something I didn’t know much about,’ he said, ‘but when those men spoke, I’ve never know a room so silent, so intense. People were hanging off their every word. I couldn’t get over it, they were two amazing people. The FA have said that anyone who wants to go to Auschwitz can go, and I will.’ The day after Shipper visited England’s hotel, Hart picked him out from a crowd watching a training session and the pair spent a long time in conversation.
