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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To want to visit Auschwitz?

212 replies

lottieandmia · 29/01/2017 09:04

I feel that it's something we all should do. I've been reading Primo Levi's book and I just can't imagine the level of suffering those people endured.

I mentioned it to an acquaintance and he said 'it's the sort of thing Jewish people do' and basically said I should not go, it would be depressing and there have been lots of other genocides. He has really annoyed me with these sentiments which come across as antisemitic imo.

OP posts:
dowhatnow · 29/01/2017 09:33

I'm glad I went.

KinkyAfro · 29/01/2017 09:33

I've been to Auschwitz, I found it very emotional, especially the Birkenau camp. People were taking grinning selfies in front of the memorials, I wanted to punch them

Anasnake · 29/01/2017 09:34

And unfortunately yes it most definitely is a tourist attraction. Our guide last time told us it was the 'number 1' most visited place in Poland.

lottieandmia · 29/01/2017 09:34

'I think you started this thread to be told you're a good person for wanting to go. Why not actually go, then start a thread discussing how you felt with others?'

No, I wanted to hear from other people who have visited actually. What a mean spirited post Hmm

OP posts:
3dancingladies · 29/01/2017 09:34
  • Some of our pupils were annoyed that other visitors were wandering around Birkenau with ice creams bought from the kiosk in the car park. You will also see people not being respectful - laughing, joking, taking selfies etc.*

This shocked me when I visited.

lottieandmia · 29/01/2017 09:35

Taking selfies? Shock

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Nataleejah · 29/01/2017 09:35

If it's obliterated people will forget what happened there.
It's not a tourist attraction surely.

Sadly it is. The trip i went to was "Visit Poland: (list 'things to see here')
It was years ago, pre-selfie age, but we felt like taking photos of ourselves and each other posing next to things, and our teachers and tour guides didn't know any better.
Only when i came back and told my dad that it was 'very interesting', he told me off that we should't treat places like that as some sort of amusement. I was 13.

OhhBetty · 29/01/2017 09:36

No, I wanted to hear from other people who have visited actually.
That doesn't come across at all in your post Hmm

lottieandmia · 29/01/2017 09:37

Ok Betty. You think what you like.

OP posts:
DearMrDilkington · 29/01/2017 09:38

You will also see people not being respectful - laughing, joking, taking selfies etc.

People are arses, why would anyone think it's appropriate to take selfies there.Shock

GunnyHighway · 29/01/2017 09:39

I used to live near Bergen Belsen. One of my regrets is that I never visited. Many of my colleagues did and said it was interesting but very eerie.

JerryFerry · 29/01/2017 09:39

I have visited Dachau and Auschwitz, found them very interesting and thought provoking. I couldn't really say it was harrowing, that seems a bit self-indulgent and not very respectful to the people who endured hell there. Was also very glad to be able to visit the Anne Frank museum, extraordinary place.

Nataleejah · 29/01/2017 09:41

People are arses, why would anyone think it's appropriate to take selfies there.
Because people ARE arses. And this being a tourist attraction makes tourists treat it like an attraction.

birdybirdywoofwoof · 29/01/2017 09:42

So because some visitors don't behave appropriately it should be destroyed?
Op, many people visit the memorial to wtc in ny or indeed ww1 battlefields - don't let the naysayers put you off if they are places you'd like to see.

Andrewofgg · 29/01/2017 09:43

But now as an adult, i think it should be obliterated and not serve as some tourist attraction.

Better it stays even if some of the visitors don't take it seriously. Others do. I saw a group of 14/15s start out laughing and joking and watched their attitudes change over the course of the visit.

A PP mentioned the Western Front where I have been many times over thirty-odd years, and I have seen the same reaction at Ypres and Passchendaele and Thiepval.

OP Go, and ask others to go. It is a chilling but valuable experience, whether you are Jewish or not. You certainly know somebody (Jew, Roma, socialist, Vommunist, Freemason) who would have been on the wrong side of the line for the Nazis and ended up in Auschwitz or Dachau.

lottieandmia · 29/01/2017 09:43

What I can't fully understand is what people endured whilst they were existing there (as they really didn't have any kind of a life). Apparently people were just all lumped together - many of them couldn't understand each other because they all spoke different languages.

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MrsSchadenfreude · 29/01/2017 09:44

I visited several times in the 80s when I was living in Poland. Due to communism, there were few visitors, and no cafes or tourist shops. It is horrific, particularly Birkenau, and it needs to be kept as a reminder. My great uncle was in Theresienstadt, and managed to escape. He never spoke about his time there until just before he died, but after the war, he went back out to Germany to help with displaced persons and to rebuild the country.

user1482833090 · 29/01/2017 09:44

I went a few years ago and don't regret it. I learned more that day than I ever would have from books or films. I think it elicits a sort of odd response from some people though. We got on the bus to go to Birkenau, moments after leaving actual gas chambers where we heard about the most horrendous things happening, and the person in front of me was sat happily playing effing Candy Crush! The tour guide (quite rightly) gave another guy a bollocking for talking on his phone while we looked at hundreds of photos of people who were killed. I don't understand people who go if they aren't going to give it the respect and meaning it deserves. As we were told, you don't know who anyone among your tour group has lost or what personal connection they might have.

birdybirdywoofwoof · 29/01/2017 09:47

Recently, a photographer took photos to shame selfie takers, not at a camp, but at a memorial in Berlin (sorry can't find link)
It's had mixed response - some say it's good people go, they're young people etc etc

No one said it should be obliterated however. Confused

Mummyoflittledragon · 29/01/2017 09:47

When dd is older, I would like to go and take her. Dh and I visited Dachau, which was very sobering and Anne Franks house. Aushwitz is supposed to be incredibly eerie. I get chills just thinking about it and afraid. I cannot begin to imagine how the poor people, who suffered such brutality must have felt.

DrasticAction · 29/01/2017 09:53

Andrew your socialist comment just made me think, is there any similar site to commemorate the millions killed by the socialists in Russia and China etc. Op as said if you want to go go. But don't have tunnel vision and blinkers to what is happening right now. I didn't have to go to auswitz sp. To feel compassion for the yadizi stranded on the mountain, or the people in nice targeted and killed or the stolen boko harem girls.... All but forgotten... Or all the people tortured and enslaved under isis rule. As pp poster said its humanitarian not Jewish whilst of a course recognising why its poignant to Jewish people. It's a crime against humanity above all and those who crimes are happening right now.

Icancoco · 29/01/2017 09:53

It is a very moving day. The guides are excellent but what you hear and see will live with you.

Someone in the group I was with got a sandwich out to eat while the guide was talking about how little the people inside had. Some people really are just idiots. There was graffiti all over the living quarters too. Unbelievable.

Krakow is a beautiful place to visit and the trip to Aushwitz a must do when there.

birdybirdywoofwoof · 29/01/2017 09:56

What on earth makes you think op has tunnel vision or blinkers?

If she wants to pay tribute to the six million murdered you think she deliberately doesn't care about yazhidis? Why would you say that?

Miserylovescompany2 · 29/01/2017 09:57

It wasn't just Jews which were targeted...

TARGETED GROUPS

The Nazis defined Jews as a “race.” Regarding the Jewish religion as irrelevant, the Nazis attributed a wide variety of negative stereotypes about Jews and “Jewish” behavior to an unchanging biologically determined heritage that drove the “Jewish race,” like other races, to struggle to survive by expansion at the expense of other races.

While it classified Jews as the priority “enemy,” the Nazi ideological concept of race targeted other groups for persecution, imprisonment, and annihilation, including Roma (Gypsies), people with disabilities, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and Afro-Germans. The Nazis also identified political dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and so-called asocials as enemies and security risks either because they consciously opposed the Nazi regime or some aspect of their behavior did not fit Nazi perceptions of social norms. They sought to eliminate domestic non-conformists and so-called racial threats through a perpetual self-purge of German society.

The Nazis believed that superior races had not just the right but the obligation to subdue and even exterminate inferior ones. They believed that this struggle of races was consistent with the law of nature. The Nazis pursued a strategic vision of a dominant German race ruling subject peoples, especially the Slavs and the so-called Asiatics (by which they meant the peoples of Soviet Central Asia and the Muslim populations of the Caucasus region), whom they judged to be innately inferior. For purposes of propaganda, the Nazis often framed this strategic vision in terms of a crusade to save western civilization from these “eastern” or “Asiatic” barbarians and their Jewish leaders and organizers.

Nataleejah · 29/01/2017 09:58

Andrew your socialist comment just made me think, is there any similar site to commemorate the millions killed by the socialists in Russia and China etc. Op as said if you want to go go.
The thing is that none of those atrocities never been pop-culturised and actually turned into a tourist 'go-to'. There is a museum of genocide and resistance in Vilnius, Lithuania.

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