Auschwitz, 80 years on

It's actually quite surprising with the current goings on that this event is getting such coverage in the media.

Pleased it is, despite it being such a horrible thing that occurred, and anyone who has been will understand just how sickening and depraved a level the human race can stoop at it's worst and it's weakest, it's more important than ever that we don't forget and however we can, call out fascism and nazism whenever it shows its head.

 

Everyone who is able to go really SHOULD go at least once. Auschwitz/Birkenau is an appalling place but I am glad that I had that experience a few years ago having read lots about it, including personal accounts from survivors.

While stationed in Germany 1990-93 I made a point of visiting Dachau as well and found that to be an over-sanitised museum piece, obviously because the Germans didn't want it to look now as it did then. Terezin near Prague was another visit (Theresienstadt in German) and that was a pretty chilling experience as well.

Obviously the Poles and the Czechs wanted to maintain these places more or less as they were, which is only right of course.

 

Think I read somewhere earlier on today that 25% of people interviewed in the UK couldn't name one camp.

 

I went to Auschwitz/Birkenau around 8 years ago when I went to Krakow. Such a horrible place, with a really heavy atmosphere - if that's the right word. The fact that guides are done via headphone/microphone adds to the eerieness of the place as there's almost a hush whilst you're there.

Fascinating and horrifying in equal measure.

 

The Atomic Bomb museum in Hiroshima has a similar vibe to your description. You walk along the exhibits in almost total silence and I had to stop a couple of times to compose myself. There are only so many times that you can see the clothes that children were wearing on the day.

Auschwitz is on my list, but I haven't made it to Poland yet.

 

Poland is a fantastic country and well worth visiting. Gdansk is one of my favourite cities in Europe, really enjoyed Wroclaw too. Auschwitz is hard to describe and it has to be experienced. It's more a pilgrimage rather a tourist experience.

 

I watched Schindlers list again last night. The one thing that stands out to me, and applies today, is that a lot of people require little or no indoctrination to get involved in mischief and cruelty of all kinds.

 

Exactly why I’d like to go but don’t think I ever would.

 

We went in 2017. You’ve described it well.

The missus nearly vomited when we went through the room with all the shoes in. There were pairs that were literally as big as my thumb…

On the tour we did, we had an American fella similar to age to me who was really emotional. I don’t know why, but as we stopped at the train platform there was an old carriage and he started crying again, then grabbed my arm to apologise. Then got photos up on his phone. Family members were killed there.

Honestly one of the weirdest experiences of my life visiting Auschwitz, but I’d urge anyone to go. It definitely leaves a mark. As it should.

Just a shame I’ve today read nonsense from politicians about how such a genocide can never happen again. Politicians who backed Israel defending itself by trying to wipe Palestine off the map. The world is full of çunts, just as it was in the 1940s.

 

First camp established 1933 --

Most people are familiar with the names of the major concentration camps - Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Treblinka, for example - but few realize that these were not the only places where Jews and other prisoners were held by the Nazis. Each of the 23 main camps had subcamps, nearly 900 of them in total. These included camps with euphemistic names, such as “care facilities for foreign children,” where pregnant prisoners were sent for forced abortions.

The Nazis established about 110 camps starting in 1933 to imprison political opponents and other undesirables. The number expanded as the Third Reich expanded and the Germans began occupying parts of Europe. When the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum first began to document all of the camps, the belief was that the list would total approximately 7,000. However, researchers found that the Nazis actually established about 42,500 camps and ghettoes between 1933 and 1945. This figure includes 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettoes, 980 concentration camps; 1,000 POW camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm; Germanizing prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers. Berlin alone had nearly 3,000 camps.

Did the general German population - European leaders including Chamberlain really not know what was going on in Nazi Germany in the Thirties ??

 

My father came to this country after the war, the only one of his family to survive. His mother, father, sister, brother were loaded into cattle wagons and never came back from the death camp.

He never talked about his past. And not only because of the trauma. He was ordered not to talk by the British authorities. That’s because the death camp was a gulag and the totalitarian regime responsible were the Soviets. The British could never let the public know that their glorious allies were little different to the evil enemy.

As for the Russians, President Putin denies that the deportations, ethnic cleansing and murder of over one million Poles, Ukrainians and Jews ever happened. To write this in Russia would see me facing a prison sentence of at least 5 years for ‘defaming the Soviet army.’

There are thousands of children of survivors like my father in the UK. Their story can never be told as it’s never been known or admitted to in the first place.

The Holocaust is a unique horror. But it didn’t happen in isolation. The Holocaust sits at the pinnacle of countless unimaginable and hidden horrors. The Second World War as it’s taught, or remembered, is pared down to distinct episodes – Dunkirk, Battle of Britain, D Day, The Holocaust. All these happened of course. But by focusing on them we overlook the terror that saw over 50 million civilians perish – most forgotten and unnamed in unknown places.

My father’s story questions the clear-cut story of a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. And that can never be allowed. Because our rulers rely on that concept of ‘good v evil’ to justify the wars being fought now. And those yet to come.

 

I've been to numerous cities across Europe where the atrocities caused by German and Russians aren't allowed to be forgotten. The Terror museum in Budapest, and other smaller places in Riga, Tallinn and Poland.

The horrors the Soviets carried out in 'liberating' parts of Eastern Europe, I just can't get my head around, torture that belonged in medieval times. Small quarters only just big enough to stand up in. Angled floors with wedges to deform toes and feet. Spiked seats. An evil it's hard to get your head around. Yet incredibly some of this was still happening in the 1980s.

 

The greatest anti war film ever made is the Russian masterpiece Come and See and covers the Nazi atrocities in Byelorussia, an often forgotten part of WW2.

Truly incredible piece of film making. Pretty sure you can watch it on YouTube, but be prepared it's a hard watch.

 

I tried watching that recently, but it had no subtitles or dubbing, so I only got a few minutes in.

I saw it referenced in a documentary I watched about Oradour in France, which was on the receiving end of the SS as they travelled north to try and help out in Normandy.

 

There was a concentration camp on British soil - on Alderney - after the invasion of the Channel Islands.

My understanding is that the concentration camps (and we opened them in the 50s in Kenya and Malaya and the 70s in Northern Ireland) only became death camps after the collapse of the Madagascar plan in 1942 leading them into the final solution.

So while Chamberlain and the government probably knew what was going on in the 1930s - it got much worse in the 1940s.

 

I’ve visited Stutthof camp near Gdansk and also the killing fields and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia. Both horrifying experiences, both highlight the depths of depravity humanity can sink to when one set of people decide another is inferior to them.

 

We went in 2019 - we were on a trip to Krakow for my 50th birthday and the trip to Auschwitz happened to fall actually on my birthday. That's a day I'm not likely to forget.

We were only saying the other day that we really need to do Krakow again - loved it. We did it twice that year, second time was for the new year. I remember getting ready to go out on new years eve whilst listening to BBC world service on the telly and them making reference to some virus in China. Took little notice. 12 weeks later, the world closed.

 

Ironic that the kid in it, widely considered the best piece of child acting in film history, is now a paid-up Putin propagandist.

 

Oh dear.

 

According to a recent survey only 26% of UK adults could name a single concentration camp and it was worse in younger age groups. In France only 48% of 18-30 year olds had even heard of the Holocaust.

The UK actually came out at the top with regard to Holocaust knowledge.