Why I went on an 800 mile walk to Auschwitz

Why on earth would I want to walk to Auschwitz, the biggest site of mass murder on the far side of Poland? The fact that I’d already walked half the distance is only part of the answer.

Two years earlier, I had walked along the entire length of the First World War’s Western Front from the North Sea to the Swiss border. A distance of 1,000 kilometres, it took me one million steps, through soil where 10 million had become casualties. 

The idea had come from my discovery of a soldier’s lost letter, written 100 years before, describing how after the war he would create “a path of peace” along the entire Western Front. He wanted survivors and their families “from both sides” to walk together to discover what they shared in common. Weeks after writing down his vision, he was dead, killed on the first day of the Battle of Loos in September 1915.

I knew at once I had to pick up his torch. Much of northern Europe was boarded up from Covid, but 35 days later I arrived bedraggled at my destination. My book, The Path of Peace, helped to make it a regular pilgrimage for walkers and cyclists.

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I had ripped my feet to shreds on the Western Front walk and had taken foolish risks to finish. Why would I want to repeat the experience? Yet that is exactly what I was planning to do. To walk from the Swiss border, where World War I finished, to Auschwitz where World War II finished, morally, would be much harder.

I was now 70, walking through countries – Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland – whose languages I did not know and with no clear route to follow as with the Western Front. My protestation – “I will follow the rivers: the Rhine, Danube, Elbe, Oder and finally the Vistula across Poland” – proved far too woolly.

What mission? Years of digesting Second World War books and films full of hateful figures had driven me to despair. Where were the good women and men from Germany and eastern Europe? Surely they existed, and if I could bring their deeds back to life along my trail I might provide an alternative narrative to the tales of the depraved. 

I’d found my theme to inspire me along the 800 miles from the point where the western front began in the First World War to Auschwitz. I had skin in the game too to propel me: my father was Jewish, as was my first wife, Joanna, who died of cancer and who was the much-loved mother of our three children.

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My chief worry now was that I would not find “figures of light”. This was quickly quelled. When crossing the Rhine early on from Alsace into Germany I walked into Neuenburg am Rhein and learnt about a one-time resident. Albert Goering would go down on his knees to scrub streets in solidarity with Jews while his brother – the Luftwaffe supremo Hermann – was busy liquidating them.

Then, near Regensburg, I crossed the line taken in April 1945 by one of the notorious “death marches”, made up of survivors retreating from concentration camps. On it were a father and son whose family had perished in Auschwitz. “We must never let each other out of our sight,” the father warned.

Liberated by the Americans in early May, the father died three days later. The boy, Hugo Gryn, went on to become a rabbi and a champion of Christian-Jewish dialogue. In 1982 he married Joanna and me.

In Nuremberg I learnt about Hermann Luppe, the city’s mayor, who in his attempt to ban the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer in the 1930s, endured a long and bitter fight with its editor, Julius Streicher. Denounced as a “Jew lover”, Luppe was forced out of his job and the city by the Nazis. He settled in his birth town, Kiel, in constant fear for his life. Paradoxically he was killed by an RAF bomb during one of its final raids, days before the war ended.

I did complete the walk to Auschwitz and wrote a book about it — The Path of Light: Walking to Auschwitz. It was a tougher challenge and a harder book to write than The Path of Peace. But the figures of light I wrote about have changed me forever.

As one of the greatest heroes of the war, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said moments before being hanged by the Nazis on 9 April 1945, “This is the end. For me, the beginning of life.” 

My parting question is: who are our magical figures to inspire us all to “begin again”?

The Path of Light: Walking to Auschwitzby Anthony Seldon is out now (Atlantic, £20).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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