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.

@SinnerBoy wrt Azov, they are still very much active although the battalion is now renamed. They did suffer heavy losses in Mariupol but they have a very high profile recruitment campaign and so have built their numbers up. The original leader is the leader of the revised battalion - he is an avowed neo Nazi and has been active first in Donbas now in the wider conflict for ten years. There is no way a man like this fighting for his country for ten years is going to renounce his political beliefs, which are fascist.

When Biden decided to arm them as part of his overall "fling shit around because I've lost" plan during summer, even he stopped short of saying that they weren't neo Nazis any more. He just said there's no evidence of any atrocities committed by them recently. Make of that what you will, in an active war zone, but it's not exactly setting the bar high is it.

The wider Ukraine administration itself acknowledges that it has a problem with fascism in and out of the army - doubtless they are looking with an eye to the future now that a deal is all but inevitable - if they don't get a handle on these groups there could be serious unrest.

I thought the Auschwitz , Memorial Day , Holocaust Memorial Day , 80th celebrations were nicely done.
watched the London one and part of the Auschwitz one.

Enjoyed both.

The London one, the young man who played the Double Base on the Schindlers List song, was lovely, was gift he was, so talented. Couldn't take my eyes off him.

sorry, not double bass. cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. Sheku Kanneh-Mason is a 25-year-old British cellist who won the 2016 BBC Young Musician of the Year award.

well, I loved watching him!

I don't think Jews are hated in the West maybe more Arab nations and Islam preaches hate against them - Angela couldn't bring herself to say the word Jew in her Holocaust day tweet! Personally every Jewish person I have met has been kind honest and hardworking.

@Notaflippinclue You very obviously are not Jewish. Anti semitism is increasing all the time.