Things overheard in the hairdressers. Couldn’t believe my ears this afternoon.

[ChocolateDoll]

Sat with dye on my hair listening to this conversation taking place next to me. Didn’t know whether to laugh or cry

HAIRDRESSER: What you going to do on your holidays, then?

CLIENT: Well, we’re planning to visit Auschwitz.

HAIRDRESSER: Oh, right. What you gonna do there then? Just chill out for a bit?

CLIENT: Umm...well uhhh....it’s a concentration camp, you know?

HAIRDRESSER: oh right....sorry.....thought it was like a resort or something.

In a hairdressers in texas, gentleman at the next basin having his hair washed declared, in a big old foghorn leghorn texas voice;
Yes ma'am, I belong to The Jews for Jesus.
In a state as ultra conservative, right wing, flat earther Christian that has got to be some statement.

The boy in the striped pyjamas is a brilliant film and a good example for young teens to watch to understand what happened.

No it isn't - it's badly written sentimental twaddle.

I have taken my daughter to tea with a Kindertransport survivor (if that is the word). He is 85 and his description of being put on a train, in the middle of the night from Vienna, alone, in a carriage with kids as young as 2 and 3, to cross Europe, to a country they didn't even knew existed, made the hair stand up on her neck.
She is 11. Modern and all the rest but blissfully unaware that life can change in a blink. One day everyones your friend, next day everyone wants to kill you.
Take nothing for gratned.

“if it wasn’t for the concentration camps we wouldn’t have a lot of the medical advances we have today”

Unfortunately this is truer than you might want to think. 00's of German and Japanese doctors and scientists got away scot-free despite their inhuman experimentation, because the allies wanted the knowledge they'd gained from it. (After all, there would never be the opportunity to experiment on real people again - why waste the chance? Cynical, but true.)

I didnt know Auschwitz was in Poland until a year ago, read it here.

i didnt do WW2 in school, my friends dd, now 25 studied it in history, i remembering her telling me and we were shocked as it seemed such a recent subject to be studying as History, whereas our history was tudors or stuarts of something.

why would the woman having her hair cut tell her hair dresser she was going to Auschwitz on holiday, it is not exactly a holiday is it. ?

Agree about the lack of black downs, just had to google image downs, as as said above, appalling lack of images of black downs

ethnic minority children with down syndrome, before anyone leaps on me

A young Spanish lady on a gap year in England had been to London about 5-6 times, usually to “show family and friends around”. I asked her if she was going to London during her final weeks in the U.K. and she said no, because she “had seen everything”

Mm, I’m reading boy in the striped Panama’s now with the kids. I guess it’s a good way-in to the topic with the kids, because the truth is too much at a young age- but I am finding it unrealistic:

Given that so many people don’t know much about the holocaust, I would say the posters claim that we talk about it too much in this country is a bit...odd.

*Pyjamas

I am generally awful at history and geography but I’m not uneducated. I’m a nurse with a diploma, trained almost 10 years and I’m currently studying to top it up to a degree but there’s lots on this thread I’ve either never heard about or don’t know a great deal about.

I don’t think it’s worrying at all, if someone has never heard of X how can they know about it, how would they know to look it up and educate themselves unless someone mentioned it?

I watch a lot of documentaries, I can spend hours down a Wikipedia hole sometimes when I search for something I’ve seen on a thread/heard in person but there’s a huge amount I don’t know.

Example - I don’t know where Kosovo is, I’ve heard of it but don’t know if it’s a country or a town, wouldn’t be able to point to it on a map but that doesn’t make me ignorant. I’ve just never come across it before but if I looked it up now I’d remember it and would know if someone asked me.

I can’t see what’s wrong with someone saying they’ve never heard of something/somewhere. The hairdresser probably misheard but if not then it’s not her fault if she’s never come across Auschwitz before. Doesn’t mean that everyone her age has the same knowledge (or lack of) about it as is evident by this thread.

If you don’t take GCSE history it is true you won’t learn about the Holocaust in school however that is absolutely no excuse not to have some knowledge of it. I refuse to accept age as an excuse either, it’s just sheer bloody ignorance.

The people who think it’s not important to know are ime far far worse than the ones who don’t know.

I did it at GCSE and visited Auschwitz with school but even if I hadn’t, I would still have some awareness. My DF is Jewish so maybe that’s why, he made me watch The Pianist, The Boy In Striped Pyjamas, Life Is Beautiful and Schindler’s list.

I won’t accept having a degree in a different area as an excuse either. My degree is in English Literature, can I now claim that is why I haven’t heard of the chuffin’ Holocaust? .

I studied history up to year 2 in my first degree but never studied WW2.

However my parents and grandparents lived through the war and it wasn't really all the long after (1970s) so it was still pretty something that people still lived with daily. Grandparents would talk about their parent living through WW1.

The World at War TV series was on TV, war films on BBC most Saturday afternoons, and people discussed it - people still had the physical and emotional scars. The war and the concentration camps weren't history to us as we had eyewitness accounts.

I feel a bit mixed about this question. I believe that we all have to be humble and recognise the vast tracts of ignorance in the mind of most of us. In history most of us are only as good as the periods we studied.

I only found out about the Armenian genocide when I was attending a Holocaust Memorial Day event as a teacher. I only read about the Khymer Rouge in my late twenties. I know almost nothing of African or South American history. My knowledge of what British colonies really meant for those countries is sketchier than I would like it to be...

On the other hand I read a lot about the Holocaust and Stalin’s camps in my late teens and found myself developing a pretty dark mindset for a while, slightly over-informed and not taking in the true human horror. It was actually by watching fictional films that I was able to properly comprehend the enormity of what happened.

MipMipMip Kraków is the second largest city in Poland. It had a very large ghetto in World War II, and was the capital of the General Government (the wealthier parts of Nazi-occupied Poland).

I agree that in that setting if I asked somebody me where they were going on holiday and they said auschwitz I might be momentarily thrown.

I'm normally educated - we didn't do any history throughout secondard school past the victorians. I did some in English (The Long and the Short and the Tall was one of our texts for instance) - but honestly, I only know about anything else from general knowledge that you accumulate as you go through life.

It's the same with geography - it was all physical geography, so if I haven't been there, my knowledge is sketchy.

But I agree with others, she'd just switched off and was talking on automatic pilot - I do it with the kids (my ears only prick up when I hear something like "and it's OK if I do X, isn't it mum")

I have a biosciences degree. I didn't do GCSE history. I know very little about European history beyond the world wars. Was just reading an article on the BBC about Franco. I knew about the Spanish dictatorship and fascism, but I learned a lot just now too. Equally I know a genocide happened in Rwanda but I'm not sure who was killed by whom. I need to do more reading.

During my PGCE, it fell to me to run a lesson in citizenship, not history, about Holocaust memorial day. I made jigsaws as a starter of the photos taken during the liberation of Belsen. A classful of Y9 Devon children pooh-poohed the images as insufficiently appalling. I cannot tell you how stunned I was at their lack of empathy, and how easily the history could be repeated, because they viewed it all as fake news, several years before fake news was a thing.

Some of these are gems. However i don’t profess to know everything either and I’m sure others have laughed at my ignorance. It’s ok not to know certain stuff. It’s a tragedy not knowing about such intense human suffering for its through knowing about such atrocities that we may seek to prevent them in future. I didn’t learn about the Holocaust or any other genocide at school. I’ve learntbecoming an adult and remember the Rwandan genocide vividly although unfortunately this is the tip of the iceberg.

Dd learnt about the Holocaust in yr5 including seeing brief footage of dead bodies and camps. She wasn’t affected but other children were.

For all of you saying this hairdresser must not have listened in school, I've said it on a previous thread and I'll say it again: The world wars are not taught in all schools, or to all age groups.

I have a masters in history and have NEVER studied or been taught in a formal environment about the holocaust and, on a wider level, world war two.

My school history education was Vikings, Normans, Romans, the Tudors the Victorians, ww1 and the home front, 1920s America and the great depression, native American history and then at a level the civil war and French history to the revolution. Not a single mention of ww2. At degree level it was very varied but it did not include specific courses on ww2.

I've learnt all I know about ww2 by myself. If you stop learning history in y9, and don't have parents who care about history or politics, and don't develop your own interest then there's a good chance you miss out huge parts of history.

The best thing I heard in the hairdressers, from the hairdresser was; “Well I’m gay, but I definitely don’t like it up the arse. Sometimes you just have to grin and bear it.”

Your judging someone for not recognising the name Auschwitz? My god, the irony. Maybe you should judge the misery tourists instead. Or yourself for being so quick to judge and run to mumsnet to report how stupid some hairdressers are are. You're truly vile.