Auschwitz - 80 years since it was liberated. Have any lessons been learnt?

[cakeorwine]

On Monday 27th Jan, it will be 80 years since Auschwitz was liberated by Russian soldiers.

Despite the Nazis best efforts to destroy evidence, Auschwitz is a haunting place to visit. You can see the rooms with human hair in, the suitcases, the shoes. The cells where people were forced to stand and starved. The gallows. The gas chambers and the crematoria. The railway line and the platform where people were divided into those who would enter Auschwitz and those who would walk to the gas chambers.

1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz including 1 million Jews.

Others were forced into slave labour and to live in horrendous conditions.

The commander lived very near the camp - and was hanged several years afterwards near the gas chambers.

https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8x195dnlro

Have we learnt anything? There seems more division, more hate, more othering.

There are lessons from history about the rise of the Nazis and what led up to the concentration camps and the Holocaust.

@Onetimeonly2024 Until last year I worked in child protection services, specialising in perinatal mental health, so have indeed 'tried it', but many thanks for the condescension. The situations I faced in my career strengthened my view.

@ElsaLion well, removing the 7th drug addicted child from an extremely vulnerable woman who very sadly would never be capable of caring for said child strengthened mine too. That was extreme but not massively unusual. If you’ve done it, what would you do?

Lessons were definitely learnt and now they have started to be forgotten. Political figures all over Europe are portraying groups of people to be a threat to our way of life. So many parallels with Hitler who argued Jews existed outside of German culture and were a threat. That's where it all started.

Then the propaganda, the misinformation, using dehumanising language. People are unhappy and some politicians are pointing at the "out groups"

It's all happened before and we don't seem to remember.

@Sometimeswinning What a disgusting comment, especially given the thread topic.

Really would urge everyone to watch the documentary “Ordinary Men, The Hidden Holocaust”. (available on Netflix)

An unsensational, matter of fact study into how very ordinary people can be persuaded to be complicit and even enact the most terrible deeds and then justify to themselves why they did what they did. The very ordinary -ness of the subjects is chilling.

Refeeding syndrome is a terrible thing.

Soviet soldiers upon the liberation of WWII camps were met by thousands of men, women and children who had been in a state of medical starvation for months on end. The well-meaning soldiers – met at the gates of the camps by POWs with their ribs and sternum protruding from their bodies and chests and obviously in need of medical care – took food such as biscuits and chocolate bars from their own government-issued ration supplies and gave them to the prisoners, not knowing that it would lead to their almost immediate death. It is estimated that 500 POWs from Auschwitz concentration camp and as many as 14,000 from the Belsen concentration camp – most famously known as the site where Anne Frank’s family died upon capture – died of refeeding syndrome.

PS the description I just posted is from an Irish website but widely documented. Tragic. westcorkpeople.ie/columnists/when-food-can-kill-a-lesson-from-wwii/

I really don't think they have. Anti-semitism in the last year has risen to record levels...and it seems now that it is the far left who are the most bigoted. Seeing marches in London each week, with people supporting Islamic jihadist terrorists and demonising Jews by the very people you thought would support them is crazy to me. Jihadists are anti women, anti democracy, anti gay rights, anti freedom... but you have ( white, english) college students dressed in keffiyehs marching in support of them🤨 denying Jewish students access to Campus in some cases ( has happened here and a lot more in the US) but that is exactly what happened in Germany when the Nazis came to power. Jewish student unable to attend University.

What's always amazed me is how Europe came together after WW2 ended - and after all the atrocities that were carried out by the Nazis. Somehow they managed to work together despite all that had happened.

No. And I genuinely believe Muslims will be next. Apparently we are all bastard backwards rapist benefit scrounging vermin you see. We dont integrate, the food we eat is barbaric and blah blah blah and so on. We all know where this sort of talk ends.

The US and the Holocaust: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dm3cwv

Cannot recommend this documentary enough. It's a three parter, but each part is 2 hours long. The detail is incredible.

Has anyone read The Choice by Edith Eger?

I have finished this (by pure coincidence). A powerful book. The first part of the book is about her time in the concentration camp but most of it is the rest of her life and her healing.
I learnt some things I didn't know before either.

If you don't like "the censor police" deleting extremely antisemitic comments maybe xitter might be more your style these days.

So by implication, you believe that child had no right to exist? Please enlighten us on how you would go about forcefully sterilising this mother - forcefully pinning her down post- birth to mutilate her genitals/insert a coil? Or deny her basic right to food, sanitation, healthcare and shelter until she complied with your horrific deprivation of her bodily liberty? And in this almost cruel irony, you prove the very point of this thread - that no, we have not learnt from the Holocaust, because there are still individuals, like yourself, who would willingly subject others, 'lesser beings' to the same heinous degradation.

I don't think we have one bit to be honest.

To me the overriding lesson of ww2 is if you treat people like shit (as the allies did to Germany after ww2) then they'll began to support anyone who they feel is giving them a voice even if it's an absolutely terrible idea. We still see it now countries keeping people on their absolute knees and then being surprised to see they've literally created the ideal conditions for dictators and terrorists to gain power.

Also years ago I had to go to our local archives and read through some old 1930s newspapers on microfiche. I was really surprised to see the rhetoric about Jewish people in the late 1930s was exactly the same as it is today about asylum seekers. Exactly the same. IMO many more thousands of Jews could've been saved if people hadn't been so worried about letting the wrong ones in, about them taking British people's jobs and Jewish adults pretending to be children and coming through with the kindertransport. If you want an interesting read hunt out the advisory leaflet that was given to all Jewish children arriving in Britain.

I feel so sorry for Muslims at the moment, the hatred has been rising the last few years (definitely encouraged by the last Government). Muslims seem to have become the scapegoat for everything that people are unhappy about in society. The parallel with what happened in 1930s Germany is clear to see. It sickens me.

I agree.

My grandparents told me about the war in my childhood. I spent a lot of time with them and gained a lot of knowlegde from them.
My parents can't do that with my children and they don't spend the same amount of time time with grandkids. I think it is an important point.

As a child (and now of course) I learnt a great deal of respect for the war, the soldiers, , the resistance movement and the victims of the war because my Nan in particular talked to me about it over the years.
She lost her husband (my granddad) in the resistance movement (Scandinavian) and had to take care of the children herself and a job the rest of her life. She took part in saving Jews in Denmark.

My children are knowledgeable about the war and wars around the world. The oldest two have visited Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration camps. We are careful to educate them even the very youngst one but the first hand knowledge wears off quickly and we are left with books.

What utter nonsense.

Can't you separate radical terrorists from normal Muslims? People with common sense can.

Quite.

All associated with authoritarianism of different kinds. Some religious, some political (left and right wing), some based on age.

One of the first signs of it is a disappearance of the truth and an inability to fully dissern the truth. Years of political spin and corruption has left us vulnerable to it. An inability to be honest and tell the truth undermines trust and forces people to look elsewhere for leadership.

Faced with an economic crisis people are open to playing the blame game. That doesn't end well.

We have the perfect storm going on.

Wait till our aging infrastructure starts to collapse due to a lack of maintenance. That's when it's going to start getting interesting. We aren't far off that point (although slightly better than in the US by all accounts) because we are reaching the end of the lifespan of concrete... Coupled with heavier electric cars there's a problem (Yep we find things to legitimately blame Musk for here).

I may you live in interesting times...

Removing the7th drug addicted child from an extremely vulnerable woman who very sadly would never be capable of caring for said child strengthened mine too. That was extreme but not massively unusual. If you’ve done it, what would you do?*

We dont punish people for their vulnerability, by removing their human rights or subjecting them to forced medical treatment. There isn’t enough work done with women who have children removed through the child protection system, offering proper wrap around support and therapy would go some way to helping them out of the cycle of pregnancy/removal/pregnancy. But that would mean spending money on “bad mothers”, so it’s never going to happen.