Anyone ever been to Auschwitz?
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I've been there last week.
The thing that impressed me the most was the size of the camps. It makes you realize the dimension of the crime in a novel way.
@Klaus said in Anyone ever been to Auschwitz?:
I've been there last week.
The thing that impressed me the most was the size of the camps. It makes you realize the dimension of the crime in a novel way.
That's a really good point. It makes all the sense in the world, but wouldn't occur to me unless I'd have been able to see it for myself. I've not been but would like to.
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I literally posted about my visit this morning.
@jon-nyc said in Anyone ever been to Auschwitz?:
I literally posted about my visit this morning.
What a strange coincidence!
I also found Birkenau very eerie.
I also couldn't help thinking how they managed to build these structures in such a short amount of time. Having basically unlimited slaves seems to "help".
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no I haven’t. Here all school kids (at least until Covid) go in 11 th grade as a school trip.
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https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81AuYcuMG5L.SL1500.jpg
Best book to read to get a very real understanding of what it was like
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One other thing I found interesting about Auschwitz is how it is very intentionally also a collection of irrefutable evidence for the holocaust.
Our tour guide was a local Polish women, whose grandmother lived near the camp in the 1940s. She told us a story of how her grandmother encountered an escaped camp prisoner one day. He was nearly starved. They gave him sweet jam to eat and then he died, maybe - that's what she suspected - due to a sugar shock.
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Klaus - one little thing that surprised me was how small the Arbeit Macht Frei sign was. It went over a single lane road that looked just wide enough for a 1940s Jeep.
When I was there, 1999 I think, it was still the original sign. I think it was stolen some years back.
Has it been recovered or replaced?
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There was an "Arbeit macht frei" sign, but I can't say whether it was original or not. I guess it was not, since it looked too new.
One other thing I didn't know before the visit: How quickly people died. Usually within weeks. Before that I thought that it wasn't unusual that people lived for a year.
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A very very sad time of our history.
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Not Auschwitz, but have visited Birkenau and can relate to the impressions described above. Very recently visited the exceptionally well preserved Breendonk camp in our country. We were actually planning to visit the Dossin Barracks the same day, but decided against it on our way out of the Breendonk camp. Neither of us was in the mood for more of that horror…
