Auschwitz-Birkenau, then and now.

For me, the worst thing is not that the Holocaust happened (although of course it was more than tragic), but that something similar will probably happen again. Who knows when and where, but most humans are quite capable of barbarity.
 
Edrof said:
For me, the worst thing is not that the Holocaust happened (although of course it was more than tragic), but that something similar will probably happen again. Who knows when and where, but most humans are quite capable of barbarity.
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It wasnt that long ago that similar atrocities happened in Bosnia and Rwanda, your right, it will happen again or already is somewhere that we havent heard about.
 
Its crazy to think that whilst they were doing this, they almost had Europe in the palm of their hands at the same time.

I dont know why this all gets bought up anymore, the Jews won out of it, they got Israel, the Arabs got screwed and because of that we 'the saviours' of the Jews are the ones living under fear of Arab terrorist acts.

Worked out well did that - wp Winston.
 
Moses said:
In what way?

Before I went, I was expecting the worst - so was steeling myself for the inevitable emotional breakdown. But, it was just a really nice sunny day, etc, so the place seemed strangely nice. Obviously it's a bit nasty seeing all the stuff like shoes/bags/hair/glasses/etc... but it wasn't as ~shocking~ as I expected.
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Same here. I went last year and I didn't get any overwhelming saddness at the place. I thought I'd be tearful all the way round but it didn't happen. I was more upset at Schindler's factory.
 
The scourge of the swastika

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search/r...&tag=lpo_ixdpamusukengl_book-21&index=blended

Worth a read if you've a mind to know a little more than an overview from the history channel.

It's not any criticism, but if you didn't 'feel' anything unusual at such a place as Auschwitz, get this book and read it. (it's fresh in my mind as I've just finished reading it)

Here's a taste from the preface and the final chapter.

Sir Hartley Shawcross said:
Apologists for defeated nations are sometimes able to play upon the sympathy and magnanimity of their victors, so that true facts, never authoritatively recorded, become obscured and forgotten. One has only to recall the circumstances following the last world war (ww1) to see the dangers to which, in the absence of any authoritative judicial pronouncement, a tolerant or a credulous people is exposed. with the passage of time the former tend to discount, perhaps because of their very horror, the stories of aggression and atrocity that may be handed down; and the latter, the credulous misled by perhaps fanatical and perhaps dishonest propagandists, come to believe that it was not they but their opponents who were guilty of that which they would themselves condemn. And so we believe that this Tribunal, acting, as we know it will act notwithstanding its appointment by the victorious Powers, with complete and judicial objectivity, will provide a contemporary touchstone and an authoritative and impartial record to which future historians may turn for truth and future politicians for warning.
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Epilogue
There was a concentration camp which in 1945, when it had been swept clean of its deathly garbage, could be visited by the general public. This was at Dachau, not far away from Munich, and a visitor to it would come away with a memory he could never forget.
The only prisoners he saw there were Germans accused of committing war crimes and awaiting trial or discharge. Each one of these lived in comfort in a light airy cell, had electric lighting, and in winter central heating, a bed, a table, a chair, and books. Well fed and sleek they looked, and on their faces was a look of slight astonishment. They must indeed have wondered where they were.
Leaving the living quarters now so clean and tidy, the visitor crossed to the other side of the camp where the crematorium compound was situated. There, in good preservation, was the whole machinery of death which for so long had been used to get rid of those who dared to cross the Führer's path.
Gone were the corpses which once lay in the annex waiting their turn to be burnt when the gas chamber killed more than the ovens could hold: gone too were the queues of hapless humans waiting outside in the changing room for their turn to enter the lethal chamber. Gone they were for ever; but their ghosts remained and their memories filled the air.
But there, clean and swept, still for all to see was the room where the victims undressed, the gas chamber itself with the peep-hole through which the operator watched for the last death agony so that he could switch on the electric fan to clear the air of its deadly fumes, the adjacent crematorium, and the iron-wheeled stretchers which the corpses were brought to the oven's mouth, the little rooms where bodies lay piled up ceiling-high and where the marks of their feet could still be seen on the plaster walls, the machine for grinding bones to make them into fertilizer for the adjoining farm-lands, and the rooms where the ashes were stored.
As the visitor passed through these rooms and surveyed the scene of so much suffering and tragedy, the stench of rotting bodies and the smell of burning flesh seemed to rise to his nostrils, and as he came out into the clean fresh air and raised his eyes towards the heavens to clear away this haunting vision of evil, what did he see? Nailed to a pole on the crematorium room, a little rustic nesting box for wild birds, placed there by some schizophrenic SS man.
Then and only then was it possible to understand why the nation which gave the world Goethe and Beethoven, Schiller and Schumann, gave it also Auschwitz and Belsen, Ravensbruck and Dachau.
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Perhaps the sheer numbers of people, jews, poles, russians, french, dutch, belgin, german, gypsies and so many others are just too unreal to grasp in any way that makes any tangible sense... imagine, just sit and imagine for a moment, some 12 million civilins murdered in camps, massacres, reprisals and indiscriminate and deliberate bloodshed throughout europe - crimes against civilians, prisoners of war, slave labour and the last, the utter despair of the concentration camps and the 'final solution' of the jewish question in europe... well:
This dreary catalogue of murders could be continued but it would always be the same old story. Registration, segregation, humiliation, degradation, deportation, exploitation and extermination. These were the milestones on the road of suffering along which these luckless Jews made their last journey.
To those who have never heard the tramp of the jack-boot along the village street or the Gestapo knocking at their door; who have not seen fifty of their friends and neighbours shot in the market place as a reprisal for the ambush of a single German dispatch rider; whose sons and daughters have not been taken away from their homes in the dead of night and never seen again, to such people this cannot but seem incredible and unreal.
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This man says it about as well as can be said http://youtu.be/j7br6ibK8ic
 
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