Visiting concentration camps

[Helendee]

Am I unreasonable in feeling it is ghoulish at the least to want to visit Auschwitz, Belsen and othersvif their kind?
I was on another site reading how people were booking tours to the above and stating they were “looking forward” to it.
I totally understand the importance of ensuring these monstrosities never happen again but can’t help thinking that some people seem to get some kind of kick from misery.
Please help me to see another side.

The well-known phrase Hannah Arendt used about Eichmann refers to 'the banality of evil.'

This came back to me when I visited Ravensbruck a year or so back.

I think it is an opportunity to learn about lives - the lives of people who were not part of the Nazi vision of the master race. So it's an opportunity to find out more about the experiences of Jews, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses.

So yes, it is a place to pay respect to the dead - I have forbears who died at a different camp. But I would also see it as about a way to try and find out about individuals, to affirm humanity and resist the temptation to 'other' and dehumanise people.

Perhaps even the kind of online bullying that often happens on sites like this, has some kind of link to the way in which groups and individuals were marginalised/demonised back in the 1930s, Maybe visiting such sites can helps us resist the temptation to regard some people - benefit claimants, second wives/stepmothers - as lesser, less virtuous beings....

Sorry about the essay but my trip profoundly affected me & I feel it's important to talk about it.

I really didn't quite believe holocaust deniers existed until I found myself arguing with one online. It was quite horrifying. If we destroyed these extremely historic sites, then we give them free rein to infect others with their false history.

I don't want to go. A group of us were thinking of going to Krakow and I said I did not want to visit Auschwitz. I have read about concentration camps and watched documentaries and films. I'm not in danger of forgetting or not knowing what happened, but I simply don't want to book a tour - in the same way I'd book a trip to the salt mines - and see it.

I found it hard enough in the jewish memorial garden at Budapest.

Knowing what happened doesn't stop atrocities happening around the world, nor does it make people less racist and more tolerant, but I do agree it should be taught about in schools so it isn't forgotten.

As previously stated I went on a trip to the camps with an Auschwitz survivor. I'm a History teacher and we've welcomed other survivors into school, including Leon Greenman and Faye Healey who was on the kindertransport. We have close links with the Anne Frank Trust and Beth Shalom in Nottingham. All spoke about the importance of remembering and the preservation of places like Auschwitz. The ashes of Leon's wife and child were there and he went back often to pay respects up until his death. These places are massive graveyards.
As a History graduate, teacher and examiner I thought I knew all about the Holocaust before I went. I didn't have a clue.

@Jomarchsburntskirt

That’s what I thought too. It felt like a film set as it’s so incomprehensible that such atrocities happened there

My late father was among the first troops to liberate Bergen-Belsen. I don’t think anybody can ever appreciate the true horror that he saw.

I think the use of language is the problem.
I was "looking forward" to seeing the Anne Frank house, but in the sense that I wanted to go there. I'm not Jewish, but most of my school friends were.

My first visit was winter 197?. I was the only visitor, & I cried. The curator hugged me - very comforting at the time but he'd probably be sacked for it now.

Went back a few years ago, & was disgusted at the behaviour of some visitors - selfie anyone from... non-Caucasians

I did Auschwitz as a school trip, part of our history A Level
All of us were just stunned silence all the way round. Some refused to step into the gas chambers.
I found it deeply moving. I still remember how horrified I was when you see the pictures and the sheer volume of their belongings.

I also remember people standing for a smiling picture in the gas chamber. That I think is beyond tasteless

I said earlier on that I would never set foot in such a place and I think they should all be destroyed

It's a museum. How abhorrent a thought to destroy it.

It's been made a museum as an attempt to pay homage to the millions of people who were tortured and murdered there.

It's not the V&A.

I won't go. I'm not mentally strong enough to survive it. Just watching Schindler's List sent me into crisis. I can't cope with those images in my head.

My daughter on the other hand is desperate to go as she's autistic and it's her special interest. When she was at school her history teacher was very surprised that she didn't want to go on the school visit. She said she wouldn't be able to cope with the teenage excitement of her classmates and the disrespect she knew they'd show.

My daughter was supposed to visit a concentration camp during a scout camping event a few years ago. The visit didn't happen though as one of the young leaders died very suddenly from meningitis a few weeks before the trip. She was only 16. I thought that was a wise decision. Last Christmas we were in Berlin visiting the Christmas markets so we visited the Holocaust Memorial. It was very emotional. And everybody from every nationality was very respectful. I also visited Anne Franks house in Amsterdam about 30 years ago. And I did cry. We need to keep remembering. And seeing photos and being in the places were such atrocities were carried out is so important for this.

I visited a few years ago, whilst on a 4 day visit to Krakow. I am not Jewish but live in an area with a large Jewish community so I have friends and work colleagues who are Jewish. All of them lost relatives in the holocaust. One friend whose family came to England from Krakow at the turn of the 19/20th century lost every single member of his extended family who'd stayed behind in Krakow.
I enjoyed the visit to Krakow, beautiful, interesting city. The visit to Auschwitz was memorable, life changing seems too dramatic because I knew its history. Nothing though prepared me for the feelings I;d experience when I saw all those tiny children's shoes in the glass container.

It's a real shock that anti semitism seems to be on the rise again along with holocaust denial.

I can understand going if you’ve a reason to go, if you’re studying it or you had family members who were there or who liberated it, but I don’t understand people who go for a day trip. It almost feels disrespectful, to gawk at the place so many people were tortured and murdered.

I can appreciate the horrendous nature of the Holocaust without visiting a camp, and it would upset me greatly to visit one, I don’t think it’s something I’ll ever do.

mummyoflittledragon I would really like to go to Auchwitz or Belsen.

You would really like to go to Auschwitz or Belsen? shock

They are not theme parks,

Willo. Don’t be deliberately obtuse. You know what she means.

It's a museum. How abhorrent a thought to destroy it.

It's not a museum. It's a tourist attraction

These places are massive graveyards

Exactly They are graveyards and should be places of peace and respect. they should have destroyed them and made something beautiful on the site where people who genuinely wanted to show respect could do so.

Instead people go to gawp at piles of clothing and glasses, try to feel something, imagine that they are 'a better person' just for going there.

It's the very opposite of respect

The ashes of the thousands who died in Auschwitz are still there, some are buried in large pits marked by black gravestones that you see dotted around Birkenau, some in the field at the back where the '2 cottages' once stood and became an improvised gas chamber. Destroying the camp means destroying their graves. Many have living relatives.

Three of my children did a Poland trip with school. They visited the ghetto in Krakow, and Auschwitz.

They came back changed. They learned humility and humanity. They are better adults for experiencing it.

It is a museum, and one you've never actually been to @NoCountry .

While I'm a huge supporter of people visiting Auschwitz, I think the focus on it can lead to people forgetting that at least a quarter of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust didn't die in camps.

In Ukraine, as the Nazis invaded and moved East, they went from village to village, rounded up all the Jews, marched them to fields outside the village, forced them to dig their own graves, which they then shot them into. This is sometimes called the 'Holocaust of Bullets'.

When the Nazis reached Kiev/Kyiv, over 2 days they murdered 33,771 Ukrainian Jews in this way - between the 29 & 30 September, 1941. This massacre took place at a site called Babi Yar, chosen mainly because the ravines in the landscape meant digging mass graves wouldn't be necessary, and they could finish the job more quickly.

This photo shows the mass graves that were unearthed three years later at Babi Yar by the Red Army.

It almost feels disrespectful, to gawk at the place so many people were tortured and murdered.

If you’re there to gawk, then of course it’s disrespectful. But if you’re not, it’s certainly not - is it disrespectful to visit a cemetery? People are there to learn, and solemnly remember, and to mourn.

My uncle was also at the liberation of Belsen. He took his own life after 30 years of being haunted and traumatised by it. Although he didn't physically die there his life ended to all intents and purposes the day he arrived there. I kind of feel like there should be some sort of memorial for servicemen/women lost to PTSD. Not the topic here I know. Concentration camps are a reminder of how evil people can be in the right circumstances and should be visited in a respectful and contemplative manner.

The human brain has a tendency to filter out horror. Visiting Auschwitz, or another camp, forces us to face the uncomfortable facts. I did it and it gave the Holocaust a reality that history books and other people’s stories could not. I really believe everyone should go.

It is more possible to counter the evil of Holocaust denial, if the sites involved are preserved and if they become places in which education takes place.