To want to visit Auschwitz?

[lottieandmia]

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.

The memorial in Berlin is powerful.

YANBU, it's high on my bucket list! We have a newborn and a 3yo so we're gonna give it a few years and go for a long weekend

Without the kids that is! I suppose we could wait til they were old enough to appreciate it but I'm dying to go sooner

There's always one.

I haven't been but did go to Dachau some years ago. My friend was at uni in Munich and we went when I came over to visit. For me, it was an experience that has stayed with me. I leant about the holocaust, I have read books but I'm quite a visual person and seeing it for real brought it to life for me. Seeing the (replica) housing, the size of the bunks, makes me realise just how cramped it was. I also learnt things that weren't taught in my history lessons!

I'll admit I cried while I was there. I knew I would - I told my friend I was happy to go but knew I'd cry. But I'm glad I went. Like I say, the experience stayed with me.

OP if you want a book with insight into how it was to live in a concentration camp, I recommend The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. She was a Christian who assisted in helping Jews escape the holocaust and went to Scheveningen because of her actions. It's really well written and it helped me imagine how it felt to be in that situation.

I went to the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps when traveling around Eastern Europe a couple of months after they joined the EU, so it was pre selfie and probably less established as a tourist attraction (for want of a better phrase).

I'm glad I went as it humanised the knowledge of what I knew and had seen in history books and documentaries. The Birkenau camp had a very sombre, quiet, eerie atmosphere and was bleak enough with the foundations of the huts and reconstructed huts, without the full horror of what existing there would have been like. Seeing the industrial scale of the place and the conditions that people were overcrowded into made it more real than the images in books and film.

At Auschwitz, the displays of hair that was cut off, the clothing stripped off and other personal effects like gold teeth and prosthetics really hit home at the way that people were treated as a disposable commodity not as human beings.

There have been and are other genocides, but the efficiency and industrial scale of the Holocaust is particularly chilling- that has also left these physical reminders of what has happened which is less apparent in other places.

It is important for humanity that people have the opportunity to go and reflect. Yes, it will bring selfie snapping, ice cream licking morons (a word I don't throw around lightly), but it is better for masses of people to have that chance to experience such places and reflect.

I'm glad I have been.

You should definitely go. I intend to go in the next few years.

If you've seen Schindler's list, The Piano player, The Boy In The Striped Panama's and read Anne Frank's Diary, All The Light You Cannot See and read some history books, what did you feel visiting Auschwitz was able to do that these accounts couldn't?

All my family that weren't able to leave their ghetto in Lithuania were killed there and I grew up around the fearful and traumatized relatives that made it here. I truly don't believe that by physically visiting Auschwitz could teach me much I don't already know or that I haven't already felt.

I think people gain a massive amount from being in a place- that's how many of us 'understand'.

As I keep bleating on about, I found the 1st ww sites very moving, very informative, and got a sense of the tragic scale of the horror - you CAN get this from books and poems too, of course, but it felt very important to me to be there, to honour and just 'know' and feel what happened to that generation of young men.

I won't ever go to austchwitz- similar reasons to you and someone's dh up thread but I am very very glad that people do.

I went there on a school trip too. It left a lasting impression on me. If you are visiting that area of Poland I would definitely go.
Lest we forget.

YANBU, I'd love to go to have a look round a former concentration camp. It's bloody expensive though for something to make you miserable. But it's on my "bucket list", certainly.

I went last year. It was thought provoking and those thoughts kept me awake that night.
Thankfully there were no selfie brigade, none that I saw anyway thankfully.
If you are in Krakow you should go. I learned such a lot more.
About birds not singing. If you listen out for them you will definately hear them. I did.

Dailymaillazy - you will know and be aware and have experience of your traumatised family but for many it will be an abstract knowledge only and going to these places helps with making it more a reality and a determination not to let it happen again. I've been to the Anne Frank house and it's the most thought provoking thing I've done in my life - so go where she was actually forced to live for so many years - the camps I'd imagine will be the same but I've not been. I think in this day and age to keep these memorials available is essential considering the current political situation.

I went to Auschwitz when I visited Krakow with my friend in 2008. I had previously been to Poland with my dad five years earlier (on a trip organised by Israelis who came from a small town in Poland, or whose parents/grandparents did), but we arrived after they had been to Auschwitz and I regretted not having visited it. I think it is important for everyone to visit if at all possible, whatever their nationality or religious beliefs. I've also been to Chelmno and Dachau (and the Killing Fields Museum in Cambodia). My paternal grandfather came from Poland and as far as I know all his family members who didn't emigrate were murdered in the Holocaust.

I would definitely recommend taking a guided tour (there are many from Krakow). With my friend, we just made our own way there (it was quite hard to find the right bus, as we didn't speak Polish, and the journey was quite long). For want of a better word, I don't remember there being a lot of "interpretation", as in signage or audio guides; instead, there are a lot of tour guides.

I also found it really hard to believe that I was actually standing on the site of such an infamous place of evil. I found it hard to link the buildings I was seeing, full of visitors and guides milling around, with the horrors I had read or seen programmes about. We never studied the Holocaust in history at school, but I remember having an assembly around the time of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz when the teacher told us the number of people murdered there every day would have filled our lecture theatre up 62 times. That really stuck with me.

On the subject of what's been written about this horror, can I offer a link to the brilliant Clive James's "Postcard From Munich" which really resonated with me: www.clivejames.com/books/flying/munich

"If we could really imagine what it was like we would die of grief"

"birdybirdywoofwoof

There's always one."

Such an obvious weirdo too.

I've been. I'm not personally Jewish although my Dads family were. I understand entirely why people might choose not to, but it was one of the most important things that I feel I've ever done and I'm glad I went.

Sadly some people are so self-involved that the thought of being respectful just doesn't seem to occur to them.

A few years ago there was a newspaper report detailing that some English public schoolboys (late teens) had stolen small "souvenirs" from the Jewish property on display at Auschwitz - I ca't remember what, or how they managed to even touch these things (possibly as a public school the group had paid extra to examine things more closely and the toerags took advantage of this - I honestly don't know.

Anyhow, they were caught, named and shamed - but to me one of the most dreadful things were that their parents were trying to dismiss the incident as being blown out of proportion - it was a 'schoolbag prank" - "sort of thing every young lad does" etc. Well, No - it wasn't! And these weren't seven year olds they were (IIRC) about seventeen.

No the wonder they have such a disrespectful attitude if mummy and daddy are going to bail them out every time. I was disgusted - and truly ashamed of my country that it produces people like this - over-privileged, spoilt adults and children alike.

*Schoolboy - not schoolbag

The way they limit the numbers for the Anne Frank house - by necessity due to size, helps visitors. Everyone in our group was very respectful and even talked in whispers.

I obviously felt the sadness of the death of someone so young and with so much to offer, but it was a privilege to see the film star cut-outs still on the wall and to be where she had once been.

I have taught the play based on Anne's diaries a number of times and one thing that is a constant refrain, throughout, is the way Anne can see the tower of the Westertoren Church nearby and hear the chimes of the bells, day after long day. Often from window in the loft area above the attic, she could see the gulls flying free against the blue sky. That is very poignant.

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again."

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

We used to live in Germany, near Bergen Belsen and lived in Hohne camp (next to Belsen) with lots of WWII history. We visited Belsen often as we felt it was the least we could do. Pay our respects, educate ourselves and our children. My grandfather was Royal Artillery in the war and lived in Hohne during the liberation. If you can go then you should. I never got to Auschwitz though. That is on my to do list. I hope one day the world learns from its past mistakes.

My grand-father was also among th British forces who liberated Belsen, and like a PP's grandfather, he wouldn't talk about it - except once. We were watching "The World at War" - an episode covering the camps, and he said 'That's nothing. You can't smell it on film."

By all means go. One of the most scary things about the holocaust is thinking about the many perpetrators who did it all. It was extreme compared to other human rights abuses.

However what was also extreme, was the way that Germany has taken responsibility for it in the way that they don't try to hide it and their young people are taught about it in detail.

Don't forget all the atrocities committed in the name of the UK including in Ireland and in the colonies. Many people still think of the Empire as a 'good thing' - kids are not taught about it in enough detail I don't think

LyndaLa I know what part you're talking about. That was what finished me off when I was there

I have also visited Schindler's Factory, the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, Anne Frank's House, the Phillips concern traction camp in Holland and various Normandy military cemeteries, as well as Aushwitz. Physically being in these places is so much more powerful than just reading about them.it makes it all horribly, but wrenchingly real and stiffens the resolve never to let it happen again.
Are you listening Donald Trump?