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.

I’m most shocked that people think it’s “snobby” to be shocked that someone doesn’t know what Auschwitz is. Says everything.

Information overload is the cause of this ignorance. Once people have the choice of hundreds of channels on TV and million of web pages they are free to watch exactly what they like and many people never progress beyond the reality TV/Z list celeb pap, even into adulthood.

In the 80s with 4 or 5 TV channels you were restricted in what you could watch. Kids programmes were quite a good mix of cartoons, game shows and educational programmes like Blue Peter, Newsround, Animal Magic etc.

I learned so much from Blue Peter about the world. I remember learning about Pol Pot on that programme, the Mary Rose, and god knows what else. My mum and Dad just left us to it a lot (parents did in those days, I dont recall any conversations about world affairs till I was 16 and older) so apart from school itself, when I was in primary school television was my main source of education.

Now, I think a lot of kids have too much choice of pap and unfortunately prefer the pap over the educational stuff so they never get to see the educational stuff.

My youngest certainly prefers pap given the chance. So we have to work hard to discuss issues with him at the dinner table, take him places such as castles, Imperial War museum etc and talk about history as part of that. He does enjoy it so it makes me sad that left to his own devices he sits on YouTube watching tosh that teaches him nothing about the world.

There are plenty of parents who don’t have the money or knowledge of their own to take their kids to places like museums or afford books in the house or are too busy working too jobs to pay much attention to their kids. In the old days that wouldn’t matter because TV generally added to knowledge gaps. (I do realise there was also a lot of crap on as well before anyone mentions specific programmes with no educational quality whatsoever)

Now you can choose topics in your news feed, so you might only request stuff on entertainment and media and come to think that is the main topic Of interest in the world (hence people not knowing what Brexit is)

Together with people living fake lives on social media, sometimes I think we were all much better off in the days before the general public had access to the internet.

The sad thing is that working in a secondary school I see plenty of newly qualified teachers who don’t have basic general knowledge. One recently didn’t know what titanium was. Did she never even wonder what the line in the song meant?!

It’s not a snobbery, it’s a real worry that grown adults are becoming teachers and parents to kids and passing on their own ignorance without even realising they have such basic gaps in knowledge.

I’m not saying that Schindler’s list is the only WW2 film either btw

Maus is a good introduction for children also, it’s a graphic novel and begins during the Weimer Republic years, telling the story as mice (with Nazis as cats)

@helmetbymidnight but to be devil’s advocate - Pol Pot and the Kymer Rouge in Cambodia was also highly systemised, large scale annihilation. Something like a fifth of the entire population was killed.

I don’t like the sometimes unsaid undercurrent that WW2 and the Nazis were particularly shocking because most of the perpetrators and victims were white/western/‘civilised’ eg had produced classical music. As opposed to victims of atrocities elsewhere, where we might be a lot less familiar with the culture, history, literature etc. But of course the victims there were just as human as an victim of the Holocaust.

I have no doubt that the parent of a child killed by the Kymer rouge had the exact same depth of emotion as the parents of a child killed in Aushwitz.

I have no doubt that the parent of a child killed by the Kymer rouge had the exact same depth of emotion as the parents of a child killed in auschwitz

Well who on earth would suggest otherwise?

No one would suggest it outright. But a focus on some atrocities rather than others does give the implicit impression that some lives are worth more than others.

Youth is certainly no excuse,neveradullmoment, but she may be a very, very good hairdresser. Would that be valid mitigation?

You can't focus on every shitty thing done through history - but WW2 wasn't exactly a civil was was it? Every continent was touched - either by being a battlefield or having armies engaged. Genocide also needs to be taught as it is a particularly horrific form of conflict.

The tactics of the warmongers and dictators are scarily similar and we can learn a lot about modern politics and society by learning about this.

Even my 11 year old DD knows about the Holicayst and Auschwitz.
We took her to Amsterdam a few years back and visited Anne Frank's House. A lot of the history went over her head, but enough stayed in there. We gave talked about it at home and Anne Frank and the second Workd War has been covered in Primary school.
Some people just thrive in their bubble of ignorance I'm afraid.

Sorry, for people reading this thread and wanting to go off and read about history, it's Khmer rouge. As in the Khmer people.

I have worked with people in their early twenties. They clearly exist in such a very narrow bubble and have zero interest in moving outside of it or expanding their knowledge of the world. When pressed one couldn't name our current PM and another had no idea what a 'Pope' was, let alone who he is. Another had never heard of ovulation and assumed you were equally fertile every day of the month

I think it is, as posters have said, part of the problem that quite a lot of very non academic kids do switch off at school. Maybe they never want to switch on again? Learning = boring/failing?

Also some families are more interested than others in exploring subjects with their children.

This is not a class based problem - my family are solid working class (in fact mum was a hairdresser!) but mad about the value of education and reading - just learning in general. I have been lucky with that background.

Makes me wonder how far that attitude goes back - her family tree comes from poorest of the poor - Irish emigres to Manchester at the time of Engles (he describes the scene in detail). I wonder even when they were at the hardest times, did they still have that urge to know? Or did that come when there was enough bread on the table?

Anyway as a result of someone somewhere along the line (and a great teacher who read us 'The Silver Sword' - children's book set in 2WW) both me and my sister are avid readers of history and other stuff! My main memories of history at primary are - painting queen eliz 1st with a massively elaborate ruff. Learning about Native Americans (fascinated - wanted to go and live like that, sadly, didn't quite 'get' I was a couple of hundred years too late - I think they may have skipped over the introduction of diseases/reservations/taking of land by settlers). Secondary it was local history and Saxon burials. Anyway by the time I got to 16 I was hooked and reading everything my local college could provide, especially on women and history.

I can't recall when I became aware of the holocaust though.

Anyway - sometimes it's just luck - with family, with teachers who encourage us to find out what's been going on - and to ask who is telling the story? I recently read When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit - so good! (by the author who wrote 'The Tiger who came for Tea' and the Mog books).

Cut out Girl on R4 was another view on Dutch WW2.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bfxjjy
The Reunion - Auschwitz Survivors (Radio 4)

Etty Hillesum - diary also very moving, deserves more readers.

And yes, it's more important than ever that we remember. Otherwise people will swallow the same old dark lies again.

mentioned this thread to dd, aged 18, who had heard of Auschwitz, thought it was in Germany, probably like i did, wondered why it was in Poland.
Actually the hairdresser cuts hair and probably is far more knowledgeable about doing so than a lot of the posters here

That is crazy! It reminds me of the list of the 10 most stupid questions for people who go on cruises, to certain places, etc. Somebody asked my friend who was the food and beverage manager on one of the cruise ships if the fireworks would be held inside? Did she live on the ship? Etc. In the Cayman Islands, it is always how is the shopping in stingray city? I will put a video of the shopping in stingray city.

Oh and I work in an area of Vietnam that is known for agent orange, land mines etc., and people don't believe that there are still land mines around.

Teapot, thank you, I'm going to look those things up that you mentioned. I have visited and Frank's house and when I was a teenager I was very interested in the Holocaust. And I even played and Frank in our school play.

I spent this morning in Anne Frank House. I visited the Versetzmuseum yesterday. I didn't even do O level history at school, it was so badly taught and boring. But I have always read as much as I can and visited historical sites and museums whenever possible.
We are so lucky in the UK that museums are free. I do worry that the current young generation don't realise the importance of history.
We have university students defacing, destroying and removing historical statues and artifacts just because they are offensive in current times. All the more reason we need to keep them at the forefront of our minds. History should not be erased or rewritten.
WRT an earlier post, I used to run clinical trials. Every single protocol includes a copy of the Nuremburg Code. We must remember the atrocities so that we don't allow such things to happen again.

Generalization, but I believe not many people are knowledgeable about WW2 in the Far East. Maybe a little about Burma and Singapore but not much on the atrocities the Japanese inflicted on the Chinese. Unit 731 and others were as barbaric and inhuman as anything Mengele did

I learned about the Japanese POW camps from someone who had been in one.
My dad employed him to do a bit of gardening and odd jobs. In reality he pottered in the garden, spent a lot of time in the kitchen having cups of tea. He always got his lunch too.
Poor man trembled and shook constantly. What he went through was horrific. I will never forget him. I must have been about 9 when he first came to our house.

its original meaning of mass-death-by-fire

The original meaning of "holocaust" was a sacrifice in which every part of the animal was burned on the altar (in most sacrifices, the beast was cooked, and the scented smoke went to the gods, while the priests, or on feast ossccions, worshippers, ate the rest).

The great horror of the Holocaust wasn't just the scale (Stalin killed more people in the Holodomor and the Purges - so did Mao in the deliberate mss starvation in China) - it was that s particular group of people was singled out for deliberate extermination by the most "efficient" means possible, and that this extermination continued ^even when it was obvious that the war was lost, and even though it was apparent that the troops and resources employed to kill these people would have been better employed elsewhere in the defence of Germany. The slaughter of the Jews continued almost until the last moment - even when the camps were about to be over-run by the allies, their desperate inmates were Germany.

The Holocaust was a determined, organised, mechanised and brutal attempt to totally destroy the Jews of the world. Other targeted groups were gypsies and slavs, but there is no doubt at all that the Jews were the primary target - just because they were Jews, and not because they were in any way a threat.

They were slaughtered "for God" - they were butchered and burned and there was nothing left of them in many countries of Europe. That is why the term "Holocaust" is used.

It is not the greatest slaughter in history, but it is certainly the most single-minded and determined and probably the most gratuitously cruel..

*desperate inmates were marched to interior Germany - sorry, must have accidentally deleted some tex

@graphista my Grandad was part of the liberation of Belsen too. He was an ambulance driver (quaker) and saw some terrible things.

I think one of the things that resonates from this thread is the need to listen to people's stories. Someone mentioned hearing a Holocaust survivor's story which had a huge impact on that poster's understanding of historical events. That's what makes history relevant, particularly to young people. I know that's what hooked me.

When history is taught with facts and figures it is meaningless without the human stories impacted by events. And not just the Tudor kings or queens for example (although Philippa Gregory and Lucy Worsley haven't done badly out of it )

We have just returned from Normandy. We were walking through Arromanches (actually looking for ice cream) when we were lucky enough to spot a DDay veteran slowly & painfully walking up a hill. The facts and figures up til that point were relatively meaningless to my DSs but when we explained what that 90-something year old man had done and why he was still proudly wearing his medals over 70 years later on a quiet Thurs afternoon, it had far more impact. (And made me a bit wobbly and emotional for the rest of the day to be tbh )

I think accessing these human stories, particularly the ones about to disappear from living memory as with WW1 and WW2, are so important. That's what history is to me. And why I find it fascinating.

Great line in History Boys - History it's just one bloody thing after another.

I must admit to being quite thick when I was young, aged 16 I asked my Dad what religion the Pope was .... I had been educated in Catholic schools, RE was so fucking boring

Thank you Schadenfreude - my posting time was courtesy of not sleeping rather than getting up then & trying to edit meant I made a mess of what I was after saying.

(Still not sure how I feel about Das Brandopfer as a book title for this reason. Especially given how it plays out. I mean, the text is very powerful & honest, but the use of "The Burnt Offering" feels... a bit disrespectful, I suppose.)

The question is who's history, and lives are seen as important and why.
We are all familiar with the holocaust, but there have been many genocides. Each devastating to the community and country of the people affected by it.
In the 30s, Russian starvation wiped out millions, estimates of up to 7 million Ukranians, and 50% of the population of Kazakh.
The Cambodian genocide wiped out entire ethnic groups.
millions of Bangladeshis were killed in the seventies.
More recently in Rwanda 70% of the tsutis killed and large amounts of other ethnic groups.

These are events that will take decades to recover from, if people can recover at all. They unstabalise regions, and have long term effect on politics.

Right now as we speak there is a genocide going on against the Rohingiya in Burma. How many can tell us the ins and outs of the genocide That Is happening at this moment?
Why would it be less important for us to know about then any other genocide?

TRIGGER WARNING *
I'm sure the women who've had their babies thrown into the fire confront of them while being raped, after seing their husbands being shot would say that this genocide is gratuitously cruel.
And rape, mutialtion and sexual violence being used as a systematic form of oppression in Rwanda is despicable beyond comprehension.

"Never Forget" should mean never forget, never look in the other direction, never think that because of your ethnicity, or religion, or skin colour, or location, your tragedies are more important then someone else's.
Never Forget means, don't accept a group being singled out, vilified, othered, and being blamed for the issues within society.
But it seems people forgot a long time ago.