Trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau for 14 y o

[NoraLuka]

DD2 is 14 and her school are thinking about a trip to Poland next year, including visiting Auschwitz. I think she’s too young for this and would be upset - of course visiting a concentration camp would be upsetting for anyone but I worry she wouldn’t be able to cope with it like an adult would. She is quite sensitive about death anyway and took literally years to get over her grandmother dying unexpectedly.

Has anyone’s teenager visited Auschwitz, and how did they deal with it?

DD does know about WW2, Hitler etc. but mainly through reading and history lessons.

I think it’s important that we all know about the Holocaust, but I worry that this would be too much for a young teenager.

I grew up in Auschwitz. Visited the museum for the first time at 15. Nobody in my class was traumatised, few people got mildly upset but it was different for us as we had that awareness of our town's history, all throughout our lives. So we knew what to expect. The horrible past was our normality and a part of our identity.

You know your child best and need to have those conversations with her in depth. You need to really let her know what kinds of things to expect there - prisoner's belongings (shoes, clothes, suitcases, hair, children's' toys..), gas chamber showers, crematorium furnaces, whips and clubs used for beating etc. I mean, it truly is horrendous, but important to know and see. If my child was as sensitive as your daughter seems to be, I'd probably hold off.

Hope that helps xx

@Mischance

I would not want this - too much trauma for one so young. They can learn about these things from visiting speakers and the internet. They do not need to stand there and gaze at it all.

But surely a speaker with personal history or the internet with graphic stories of what went on there is just as touching/more impactful than visiting a historical site?

Ds, at 14, did a belguim/France trip where they visited war graves, memorial, museum and trenches over 3 days and disneyland paris on the last day. He said disneyland was his least favourite part of the trip (too many queues) and instead talked about the day trips to the other places.

I would have had no problem him going to auschwitz too and I think he would have learned a lot from it. I guess it depends on the child if the trip is appropriate for them, I would explain to them and let them choose.

My DD went in year 12 as part of an A level history trip. They didn't cover this period in GCSE but her A level syllabus included the Holocaust and also some post war European history so on the same trip they also went to various sites in the former East Germany which were quite unpleasant. But at 16 she was old enough to both cope with and benefit from the trip. At 14, I'm not so sure. All my children grew up a lot between 14 and 16, but as others have said, it does depend on the individual.
DD did do some other less intense stuff on her trip too - it wasn't all concentration camps and Stasi museums- and she said that was important or it could have been a very gruelling trip. Similarly when mine have done WW1 battlefield trips there's been a visit to a chocolate factory or something mid way through as a bit of light relief. I would imagine most organised school trips will be similar, but I'd check the entire itinerary before making your final decision.

We took DS at 15 and he was visibly shocked and moved but absolutely fine .

Why would anybody do this?

There has been and infact is a worldwide pandemic.

Haven't young people suffered enough?

Yes, remember, honour the dead, pause and consider the magnitude of it. But take an impressionable young person there by choice, no.

Absolutely agree. Taking young people to places like this - very wrong. What are they thinking? It’s sick.

The pressure to keep up with your mates is immense for the young.

If an adult wishes to go, I guess its free choice. Not one I woul dmake because it would haunt me for the rest of my days.
A young person may feel they have to "be cool" whilst infact they are traumatised.

@MsTSwift

Absolutely agree. Taking young people to places like this - very wrong. What are they thinking? It’s sick.

Why is it sick?

I completely disagree that "it is sick".
Depends on child's age, how mature the child is and what sort of personality they are.

Some children aren't ready. But some are. If you were very mature naturally and had spent many years studying the atrocities and had read many books, studied it, both the German history, the Russian history, the Jewish history, talked about it with teacher and parents, watched many documentaries as part of syllabus, and also some good films, then the basis for a visit is ok.

What do people think you see when you visit these places? As I said upthread, the horror comes from knowing what happened there, but as that is quite hard to get your head around anyway, as an adult let alone a teenager.

I was very glad I went, it was interesting and thought provoking, but it wasn't traumatic in any way. I didn't have the life experience or the understanding for it to be traumatic.

My dc ( also in France) went, maybe at 16. It was fine, obviously very moving but they both seemed to hold it at a distance. Dd was more perturbed by a problem on the bus. Fast forward two years and a survivor of the camps came to work with the dc in school. My ds cried in the car on the way home.
It depends on where the dc is at at the time. For me 14 is too young to fully assimilate fully.

I've been as an adult. I'll be honest, I knew a lot about the holocaust already and didn't necessarily find being at the site moving. I found the Jewish Museum in Krakow more personal and emotive for me.

Behaviour of other people there was interesting: some people were clearly having deeply personal experiences, some were just on a day out and taking selfies, some were there for the history and just very interested, in big groups you could sense a certain amount of competitive emoting going on especially with teens.

So you get a range of everything going on.

14 is about the age you should be aware of world history and that behaviours like this are alive and thriving today - Rwanda, Bosnia - we can't stay in our bubbles forever saying we are too sensitive.

I think at 14 they are old enough to understand the world and should go - my experience in my teens when I went was totally different to when I went again as a mother

How on earth would you assess if a 14 year old is 'ready'

I was a sensitive teenager, but I agree that teens often don't process things quite like an adult would because they are still emotionally immature, even if they seem to have a good level of understanding and are articulate.

For example, 9/11 happened when I was 13, I knew it was bad, but I didn't really feel the full horror - even with the uncensored images on TV that day of people falling. On the tenth anniversary I immersed myself in stories from the day and really felt the impact of it for the first time and was horrified and found it very upsetting.

I remember going to the holocaust exhibition at the imperioal war museum at about 14/15 - it was moving, but not traumatic.

I think as an adult, particularly (for me) after having children you have much more scope of imagining yourself as a parent going through that experience or what it would be like for your children to go through it. I'm sure people without children find it just as moving! As an adult you just have more of a sense of scale and more life experience to inform your empathy.

When I visited I expected it to be a somber and moving experience. However there were hoards of people all grouped with their tour guides. The guide gives a fast paced guided tour with a running commentary which you listen to through through headphones (necessary because there's so many tours all at the same time). There was little time to stop and take in anything as we had to keep moving on to keep up. It wasn't what I expected and there was little time or space to reflect.

I went to Dachau at a similar age. I was extremely sensitive and I was definitely mature enough to understand the scale of the holocaust, so yes, it was very disturbing and upsetting. The impact has stuck with me for decades. However, it was also very educational and I'm really glad I went. That kind of experience should be deeply shocking and disturbing...people need to understand the reality of what happened.

My nephew went to Auschwitz at 14, and it made a deep impression on him too. Difficult but very important. I know that he really valued the experience.

I don't think that teenagers are too young to understand some of the atrocities that human beings perpetrate against one another, and if it upsets them, then that isn't necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, I think it's important for them to develop that visceral understanding of how utterly awful it was so that they are motivated to try and prevent that kind of thing happening ever again.

I would let her go, OP. I am grateful for the opportunity that I had at that age, as it helped to shape me and my values.

Let her go. The enormity of what happened there won’t truly hit home like it does to an adult.

Your child should be traumatised by what she sees. That's the point. Hopefully she will see it and decide to spend her life fighting against the things that allowed it to occur in the first place.
When I was 11, I knew nothing about history and the world wars. When I was 12 I started learning about war poetry. By 14 I asked my parents to visit the trenches and the graveyards of Belgium and Northern France. It has led to a life long obsession and passion and a lot of charity work. Did I find it hard and emotional? Absolutely. I went to Saschenhausen as a 16yr old, Auschwitz at 17 and again at 25.

To those saying they couldn't possibly visit as it's too emotional - people LIVED that reality, do them the respect of looking it in the eye and facing the beast.

14 is old enough to understand, and take on board the lessons we all need to learn. Prepare her in advance but history isn't something to be shied away from. Children much younger than 14 lived through it after all.

I agree @Keladrythesaviour. There is a value in being disturbed by the reality of what happened.

Some things you can’t unknow. I watched a documentary on Netflix recently about a nazi trial and one of the things I heard on that program (which I switched off) has haunted me ever since and I think about it every day. You can appreciate the horror without immersing yourself in the details of it.

I agree that there are some things that you can't unknow. I just disagree that that's necessarily a bad thing.

We need to know and truly understand what happened so that we don't sleepwalk into allowing something similar to happen again.

Of course it needs to be taught but its not necessary to do that to expose young teens to the details. I walked out of Schindler’s list. I literally cannot bear it.

@MsTSwift

Of course it needs to be taught but its not necessary to do that to expose young teens to the details. I walked out of Schindler’s list. I literally cannot bear it.

You can't bear to watch a sanitised, romanticised story about the Holocaust? Those who lived (and died) through the reality didn't get a choice, and none of them expected it. It could happen to may of us, at any time. It's the details that make people really understand. If people only know the "gist" they don't know what to look out for. It didn't happen out of the blue, it built over decades and people, governments and countries willingly looked the other way throughout.