Anyone ever been to Auschwitz?
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I literally posted about my visit this morning.
wrote on 15 Aug 2024, 14:58 last edited by@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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wrote on 15 Aug 2024, 14:59 last edited by
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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wrote on 15 Aug 2024, 15:01 last edited by
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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wrote on 15 Aug 2024, 15:01 last edited by
I read that a couple months ago
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wrote on 15 Aug 2024, 15:03 last edited by
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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wrote on 15 Aug 2024, 15:05 last edited by
For those that don’t know, Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II, is on contiguous land but with a separate entrance. It’s the more famous view and where ‘the selection’ occurred.
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wrote on 15 Aug 2024, 15:06 last edited by jon-nyc
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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wrote on 15 Aug 2024, 15:22 last edited by
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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wrote on 15 Aug 2024, 15:31 last edited by
A very very sad time of our history.
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wrote on 15 Aug 2024, 19:42 last edited by
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…