Somewhere in the depths of the photo thread I mentioned our trip to Auschwitz and Dada asked to see the photos once I put them online... Well, they're at:
http://www.pbase.com/wangi/auschwitz
It's the scale of Birkenau that really hit me...
Auschwitz
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Cleopas
I don't even want to think about those horrors, never mind look at photos. Two thirds of my GP's family were murdered at Dachau and Treblinka. I know it's only buildings, but the sheer scale of what happened there is beyond my imagining ... and I don't want to.
It should all be razed to the ground and buried and a living memorial raised instead.
It should all be razed to the ground and buried and a living memorial raised instead.
Thanks wangi. I visited in 1992 but only went to Auschwitz and not the big one at Birkenau.
Cleopas raises an interesting point as to whether these places should be preserved - I guess there are arguments both ways.
My own feeling is that they shouldn't be destroyed - there is no experience to match seeing something like this with your own eyes, and to destroy it (in this instance) would finish the job for the SS who hastily dynamited the gas chambers ahead of the advancing Red Army.
I can see the other argument though - and whether the genocide in question is better known or has not been as prominent, it hardly matters once people have perished somewhere what remains - although who knows what they would say? Maybe they would think that keeping it intact was too morbid or painful.
My great uncle was a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore and Burma - but until watching a documentary the other night I had no idea that 7 out of every 10 that died on the railway construction project was Asian - as well as POWs the Japanese used slave labour. Those people deserve to be remembered as much as any of our own nationals.
I guess Auschwitz is a symbol of humanity at its darkest and my own feeling is that the current museum should remain as a monument to all victims of genocide.
Cleopas raises an interesting point as to whether these places should be preserved - I guess there are arguments both ways.
My own feeling is that they shouldn't be destroyed - there is no experience to match seeing something like this with your own eyes, and to destroy it (in this instance) would finish the job for the SS who hastily dynamited the gas chambers ahead of the advancing Red Army.
I can see the other argument though - and whether the genocide in question is better known or has not been as prominent, it hardly matters once people have perished somewhere what remains - although who knows what they would say? Maybe they would think that keeping it intact was too morbid or painful.
My great uncle was a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore and Burma - but until watching a documentary the other night I had no idea that 7 out of every 10 that died on the railway construction project was Asian - as well as POWs the Japanese used slave labour. Those people deserve to be remembered as much as any of our own nationals.
I guess Auschwitz is a symbol of humanity at its darkest and my own feeling is that the current museum should remain as a monument to all victims of genocide.
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Cleopas
Unfortunately, if you look through the history of the human race ... genocide is all too common.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history
From pre-biblical times up to Stalin, Pol Pot and Saddam ... whole populations have been slaughtered on the altar of self-preservation and the abomination of racial purity.
While I agree the Holocaust must never be forgotten ... who remembers the Marsh Arabs? The Rwandan genocide? Where are their memorials?
The further back in time you go ... there they are ... the extinction of the Cathars, the Bogomils (no I didn't make that up!), the Circassians??
And within two hundred years the land where Auschwitz stands will be thought of as prime for building. It happens. We build over our history.
Which is why I think there should be a site somewhere in each country with a shrine like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or the Cenotaph ... dedicated to the murdered millions of history.
We vow it will never happen again ... and it does. More regularly than we like to admit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history
From pre-biblical times up to Stalin, Pol Pot and Saddam ... whole populations have been slaughtered on the altar of self-preservation and the abomination of racial purity.
While I agree the Holocaust must never be forgotten ... who remembers the Marsh Arabs? The Rwandan genocide? Where are their memorials?
The further back in time you go ... there they are ... the extinction of the Cathars, the Bogomils (no I didn't make that up!), the Circassians??
And within two hundred years the land where Auschwitz stands will be thought of as prime for building. It happens. We build over our history.
Which is why I think there should be a site somewhere in each country with a shrine like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or the Cenotaph ... dedicated to the murdered millions of history.
We vow it will never happen again ... and it does. More regularly than we like to admit.
I agree with Dadaist that it should be preserved. I was there in 1990 and it was a deeply moving and affecting visit.
To stand next to the 1 square metre punishment cells which held 4 prisoners (just think about that for a moment) and to have the messages scratched onto the walls by prisoners who knew they were to be shot in the morning, read to us by our Polish guide was horrific.
And nothing will ever prepare you for entering the huts which had large glass display cases down each long side and thinking that they were filled with what looked like soil - only to get closer and see that it was human hair - you could see pigtails with the ribbons still tied in them. The next hut was full of spectacles. The next crutches and calipers. The next suitcases - with home addresses from all over Europe painted on them in white paint. A truly depressing visit but something that everyone should try to experience.
Perhaps the most depressing part was the banality of it all. I was standing looking at the gallows where the Nazi commandant had been strung up after liberation and I saw something move in the bushes behind. On closer examination there was a fence and on the other side of the fence was the garden of a house and a woman was lifting potatoes. The camp stands in the middle of a perfectly normal housing estate - its like driving through Craigentinny and turning the corner and there it is. There were people selling ice cream and coke to the visitors. And I believe there is now a Holiday Inn Auschwitz.
Even stranger was to have lunch in the restuarant there - I didn't have much of an appetite.
Obviously there are issues re preservation of the buildings but I think every effort should be made to look after it and to encourage people to visit.
To stand next to the 1 square metre punishment cells which held 4 prisoners (just think about that for a moment) and to have the messages scratched onto the walls by prisoners who knew they were to be shot in the morning, read to us by our Polish guide was horrific.
And nothing will ever prepare you for entering the huts which had large glass display cases down each long side and thinking that they were filled with what looked like soil - only to get closer and see that it was human hair - you could see pigtails with the ribbons still tied in them. The next hut was full of spectacles. The next crutches and calipers. The next suitcases - with home addresses from all over Europe painted on them in white paint. A truly depressing visit but something that everyone should try to experience.
Perhaps the most depressing part was the banality of it all. I was standing looking at the gallows where the Nazi commandant had been strung up after liberation and I saw something move in the bushes behind. On closer examination there was a fence and on the other side of the fence was the garden of a house and a woman was lifting potatoes. The camp stands in the middle of a perfectly normal housing estate - its like driving through Craigentinny and turning the corner and there it is. There were people selling ice cream and coke to the visitors. And I believe there is now a Holiday Inn Auschwitz.
Even stranger was to have lunch in the restuarant there - I didn't have much of an appetite.
Obviously there are issues re preservation of the buildings but I think every effort should be made to look after it and to encourage people to visit.
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Cleopas
Holiday Inn Auschwitz ... In which case they should be demoished, because just around the next corner will be the Disneyfication of the place. The Holocaust Theme Park! Sorry ... but that's what I see coming if they have tearooms and ce-creams sales going on on the perimeter already.ali wrote:I agree with Dadaist that it should be preserved. I was there in 1990 and it was a deeply moving and affecting visit.
To stand next to the 1 square metre punishment cells which held 4 prisoners (just think about that for a moment) and to have the messages scratched onto the walls by prisoners who knew they were to be shot in the morning, read to us by our Polish guide was horrific.
And nothing will ever prepare you for entering the huts which had large glass display cases down each long side and thinking that they were filled with what looked like soil - only to get closer and see that it was human hair - you could see pigtails with the ribbons still tied in them. The next hut was full of spectacles. The next crutches and calipers. The next suitcases - with home addresses from all over Europe painted on them in white paint. A truly depressing visit but something that everyone should try to experience.
Perhaps the most depressing part was the banality of it all. I was standing looking at the gallows where the Nazi commandant had been strung up after liberation and I saw something move in the bushes behind. On closer examination there was a fence and on the other side of the fence was the garden of a house and a woman was lifting potatoes. The camp stands in the middle of a perfectly normal housing estate - its like driving through Craigentinny and turning the corner and there it is. There were people selling ice cream and coke to the visitors. And I believe there is now a Holiday Inn Auschwitz. Even stranger was to have lunch in the restuarant there - I didn't have much of an appetite.
Obviously there are issues re preservation of the buildings but I think every effort should be made to look after it and to encourage people to visit.
And that's just as sick as the crimes of the Nazis.
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Hell's Cat
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Do you really think that the human race will still be here in 200 years? At the rate we are destroying the planet and killing each other, in addition to proposing more nuclear power stations, what are our chances? Vote now!Cleopas wrote: And within two hundred years the land where Auschwitz stands will be thought of as prime for building. It happens. We build over our history.
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Only after the last tree has been cut down, only after the last river has been poisoned, only after the last fish has been caught, only then will you find, that money cannot be eaten.
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Jackson Priest
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People have a need to sleep.
Anyway, the treatment of the two main camps - Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Birkenau) - is very different.
From the exterior Auschwitz I simply looks like an Army barracks, and indeed there is an army barracks right next door along with houses and the rest. The buildings inside the camp are given over to a museum - and as Ali said above these collections really do make the scale of the crime apparent.
Birkenau is a completely different story - it's in an isolated position. This was never a concentration camp, it was a death camp on a shocking industrial scale. Only a few buildings remain intact, with the rest having only there brick foundations and chimneys remaining. Buildings are preserved but not restored. The site of chimneys in the distance as far as the horizon is shocking (I think the camp's area is 175 hectares - 25 times the size of Auschwitz). It's not permitted to walk over much of the site, because the ashes of the victims were scattered between the huts, and the entire area is seen as a grave site...
Birkenau also has the monument: "In between Birkenau's former crematoria II and III, Polish authorities erected the International Monument to the Victims of Fascism, which bears inscriptions on more than a dozen languages to honor the more than 1 million murdered at the Auschwitz camp complexes."
L/
Anyway, the treatment of the two main camps - Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Birkenau) - is very different.
From the exterior Auschwitz I simply looks like an Army barracks, and indeed there is an army barracks right next door along with houses and the rest. The buildings inside the camp are given over to a museum - and as Ali said above these collections really do make the scale of the crime apparent.
Birkenau is a completely different story - it's in an isolated position. This was never a concentration camp, it was a death camp on a shocking industrial scale. Only a few buildings remain intact, with the rest having only there brick foundations and chimneys remaining. Buildings are preserved but not restored. The site of chimneys in the distance as far as the horizon is shocking (I think the camp's area is 175 hectares - 25 times the size of Auschwitz). It's not permitted to walk over much of the site, because the ashes of the victims were scattered between the huts, and the entire area is seen as a grave site...
Birkenau also has the monument: "In between Birkenau's former crematoria II and III, Polish authorities erected the International Monument to the Victims of Fascism, which bears inscriptions on more than a dozen languages to honor the more than 1 million murdered at the Auschwitz camp complexes."
L/