The visit by Germany coach Joachim Loew and some of his players to
Auschwitz on Friday will be gesture for tolerance and against racial hatred
that other teams at Euro 2012 aim to follow.
"We are aware of the
responsibility we have representing Germany when we travel to Poland and
Ukraine," Germany team manager Oliver Bierhoff said of the visit by the
national federation DFB delegation.
Loew will be accompanied by team
captain Philipp Lahm and his two Polish-born team-mates Miroslav Klose and
Lukas Podolski, for the visit to the memorial at the former Nazi extermination
camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The England team, which is to stay in
Krakow, had already planned a visit to Auschwitz, about 60 kilometres away,
while the Italia and Dutch teams were also planning visits.
In the host countries - the
historically-minded Poland and Ukraine - the past casts a long shadow,
particularly for German players.
The team visits will be of a private
character, with museum officials to avoid any media spectacle at the site where
the Nazis killed some 1.3 million people, mostly Jews, during World War II in
occupied Poland.
Visitors to the museum in southern
Poland during the tournament will also have to leave behind football
accessories like team scarves, horns and flags.
For Irving Roth, who survived Auschwitz
and also the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany as a 14-year-old from the
Czechoslovak town of Kosice, the debate over whether teams should visit the
site was superfluous.
"I think everyone should come
here," he said.
"Why else do we have symbols of
good and evil? To remind ourselves, to learn from them, to ask how that could
have happened. Auschwitz was the ultimate killing machine, and these sportsmen
should visit the camp in a fully official way."
Bernhard Storch, whose family was
murdered by the Nazis, said: "All players, all teams should see this
place,"
Storch, who is from Bochnia, near
Krakow, but now lives in the United States, added: "They should see it,
and they should learn. Nobody will reproach the German players with anything,
and I think they will still sleep well and be able to score goals.
"There is nothing here that they
should be afraid of. It is very important that they should come here."
Edie, a 17-year-old from Dallas, Texas,
who visited Krakow with a Jewish youth group, thinks the visit by Germany
players, who are only a few years older, would be important.
"Of course Nazi crimes have
nothing to do with them personally! But it's important to pay tribute to the
victims and to show we disagree with those who deny the Holocaust."
If the Germany team, with its players
of diverse ethnic backgrounds, should visit Auschwitz, that would also be a
strong symbol for the "other Germany," says Amid, 24, who is from
Israel.
"Current Germany is different and
acts differently from Nazi Germany. And if the German national team
symbolically honours the victims of Nazi Germany with their visit, this is also
a clear gesture for those 'fans' who spread extreme-right and racist slogans in
stadiums," he said.
Irving Roth, 83, still remembers well
the pain he felt as a nine-year-old for no longer being allowed to play in the
local football club because he was a Jew.
A visit to Auschwitz by the German team
would also be a call for tolerance, a gesture against hatred of minorities, he
said.
"They should not only come to
Auschwitz, they should also see Birkenau, where the extermination
happened," Roth says with a firm voice.
"And they should meet with a
survivor who tells them of that time. I would volunteer to do that!"
20 June each year is dedicated to raising awareness of
the situation of refugees throughout the world.
Movement Against Intolerance shares the complaint made by UNITED FOR INTERCULTURAL ACTION since 1993 about the Fatal Realities of 'Fortress Europe'.
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