Auschwitz

[HARRY THE MOLE]

My next door neighbour's daughter recently paid a visit to Auschwitz with her Jewish boyfriend while he paid his respects to his relatives. The pictures they took were passed on to me to display here. I still find it hard to believe that there are those who would deny that any of this happened.

Cheers,
Steve

[BrodieBartfast]

Visiting this place is an experience that will haunt a person forever. Having visited previously, I think it should be mandatory that everyone visit at least once. It is an eerie, quiet feeling you experience when you first walk under those gates. Like being in a graveyard. It's almost as if the walls themselves radiate the accumulated pain and sorrow of the people who suffered and died there. The suitcases and piles of shoes, the mountains of human hair. It was the pile of glasses that affected me the most.

Then you move on to Birkenau, and the sheer scale of it is horrifying. You wonder what could possess a group of people to treat other human beings with such inhumanity and disdain. You can only really describe it as a death factory, because that's what it was. An industrial system set up with the sole purpose of destroying human life.

It may be a difficult place to visit, but it is necessary to understand the depths of human evil, and to realise that we must never allow something like this to happen again.

Thank you for sharing this. Never forget.

B.B.

[HoundsTooth]

I visited about 10 yrs ago in winter. It is a surreal place and it's difficult to take it all in at the time.
As Brodie says, the scale is immense - Birkenau is huge.
The thing that really got me was the human hair - great piles of the stuff including a little girls pigtail - it looked like it had been cut only yesterday.
Nick

[Wilko]

I have not had the opportunity to visit Auschwitz yet but it is a place that I feel it is my duty to visit in my life.

I have read a lot on the Holocaust over the years including the Memoirs of Rudolph Höss. A most chilling and disturbing read to put it mildly.

I sometimes wonder when the Human race will wake up and realise we are all one people on this fragile Earth, irrespective of colour or religion. When the world finally does become one I can just imagine the great things mankind will achieve. I prey for a day when ethnic cleansing truly is a thing of the distant past.
Wilko

[CARL]

Thank you for posting Steve.

We may well be returning to the Auschwitz camp system again next spring, likely to be our next guided study tour. Personally, it may be my 14th visit to the site...I honestly lost count some time ago. The museum has changed the way it operates in recent years, numbers of visitors have risen sharply (now over 2 million a year) all of whom experience something that they will never ever forget...nor should they.

Carl

[FALLSCHIRMJAGER]

Thanks for posting Steve, as history and present goes, this is my most personal area of interest and having been to Auschwitz and other sites myself, i can only applaud any "attention" brought to the whole area of the Shoah, persecution, and murder of countless other "people", politicals, clergy, homosexuals and any other pathetic reason the Reich could think of. Leon.

[Rossi]

Thank you Steve for posting. I remember my visit there with my Oma and Opa. A very sad, somber and chilling feeling comes over you. I remember the tears that were shed. When we visited there was a massive storm brewing and thunder so loud. I will never forget it.

[Rakkasan187]

Very moving photos.. I picked up a book today which I am looking forward to reading after my current read.

It is titled " Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present" Deborah Dwork, Robert Jan Van Pelt...

Smitty

[HARRY THE MOLE]

Thanks for the comments gents... For myself, I have only visited Belsen. I was stationed in Dortmund and we used to travel up to Todendorf to fire our Bofors guns at the ranges. It was such a long drive in our 10 ton Leyland's (35mph) that we used to stop off overnight, close to Belsen. A strange and very haunting place - as I am sure they all are... on entering the clearing there was not a bird to be heard, the deathly silence and sense of grief, extremely overpowering.

Cheers,
Steve

[Gunny Hartmann]

Thanks for the comments gents... For myself, I have only visited Belsen. I was stationed in Dortmund and we used to travel up to Todendorf to fire our Bofors guns at the ranges. It was such a long drive in our 10 ton Leyland's (35mph) that we used to stop off overnight, close to Belsen. A strange and very haunting place - as I am sure they all are... on entering the clearing there was no a bird to be heard, the deathly silence and sense of grief, extremely overpowering.

Cheers,
Steve

I visited Auschwitz Birkenau about ten years ago Steve, the tour guide told us it was only very recently that birds had started to sing around the camps. If anybody visits Krakow they should go to the camps to pay their respects.