70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz.

[DavidinSouthampton]

No Moralising - Just thought it ought to be remembered.

Couldn't find a thread specifically about it elsewhere - one about a documentary programme a couple of days ago (which I missed).

Thought it deserved its own thread in remembrance of the up to 12,000 people per day who died in there and similar places.

 

[Cadiz Seagull]

Amazing place. Literally unbelievable.

I was there a few years ago, in the gas chambers along with a bus load of Japanese tourists. Suddenly they all left and I was completely alone. Just me and a million ghosts.

If you never been, please go.

 

[Westdene Seagull]

RIP and sorry is all I can really say.

 

[moggy]

Amazing place. Literally unbelievable.

I was there a few years ago, in the gas chambers along with a bus load of Japanese tourists. Suddenly they all left and I was completely alone. Just me and a million ghosts.

If you never been, please go.

Totally agree, it's the one place I've been and will never forget, you can get to see both auschitz 1 and auswitz birkanau in one day, get it done on your bucket list, truly unbelievable place

 

[BBassic]

Amazing place. Literally unbelievable.

I was there a few years ago, in the gas chambers along with a bus load of Japanese tourists. Suddenly they all left and I was completely alone. Just me and a million ghosts.

If you never been, please go.

That line right there is one of the most poignant things I've read in a while. Nice one.

 

[studio150]

Have been watching the various documentaries on TV (other than the 10 hour film) and despite being aware of the issues the pictures of the walking skeletons and the bodies left piling up on the ground never fails to bring a tear.

 

[BigGully]

This week watching one programme, forget what it was called was truly poignant, I have seen many TV films over the years and visited Belsen, but this one was as brutal as any I have seen before.

 

[Steve Foster]

6,000,000 murdered in the concentration camps.

Putting that into perspective - we all remember the poppies at The Tower of London representing the fallen during WW1.

Now times that by 6.

And still there are Holocaust deniers.

 

[symyjym]

What amazes me is that our species can be brainwashed with propaganda and led into carrying out mass killing. The Holocaust is just a recent example but could also be applied to the psychology of many historical and current events.

Obviously some people are evil and blood thirsty, but peer pressure and nurture seems to also be a factor in the adoption of ideologies to the masses, and as a species our weakness is that we are susceptible to it.

I sort of feel a distant guilt to every evil deed someone puts to another just by the virtue of being associated with our species. We are still at the primitive stage of human evolution and maybe not quite human yet.

I would like to come back in a couple of thousand years to see if we have progressed or not, and if we look at our part in history as an extension to biblical times but with technology.

 

[Brighton TID]

War is war and it is nasty and evil.
However, the Holocaust took things to a whole new level of human cruelty and evil.
Still utterly unbelievable that human beings could treat other human beings this way.
Hell on earth.

 

[Buzzer]

My girlfriend's grandfather died in a concentration camp. He was one of the thousands of Catalan Republicans that General Franco sent to the Germans and he died in Mauthausen. Suffice to say it's had a very profound effect on her family.

 

[portlock seagull]

Unbelievably a holocaust denier kicked off the radio five phone in this morning, he'd lied to get through. Nicky Campbell rightly cut him off and really the idiot who'd phoned in just underlined why we should commemorate today. Those that deny it ever happened just do so because they know the pain it will cause. Their soul purpose is to cause offence towards Jews in the main. Fortunately they're in a tiny tiny minority ie Even most pro nazis acknowledge the holocaust happened, they just believed there was good reason for it!

 

[Sweeney Todd]

I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2006 and am going back there in June (during my trip to Krakow).

 

[Questions]

6,000,000 murdered in the concentration camps.

Putting that into perspective - we all remember the poppies at The Tower of London representing the fallen during WW1.

Now times that by 6.

And still there are Holocaust deniers.

Let them deny it..... It's easier to see who they are and where they,re coming from. It's easier for the rest of the world to see their motives my friend.

 

[Mowgli37]

I'll be going to Dachau in March. The horrors that went on in these places must never be allowed to happen again.

 

[Questions]

I went 8 years ago or so and won't ever forget it for the rest of my life. I thought maybe It was somehow ghoulish to visit initially but was convinced that to be in Krakov and not go and pay our respects would be odd. My wife broke down, collapsing at Aushwitz after walking through one of the small experimental gas chambers they used to dispose of the children that Mengelen had experimented on and that was before we went to Birkenhau 2 .
It's something that will stay with you for the rest of your life if you have the chance to go and you can never prepare yourself for it even if you have read up on the atrocities beforehand.

 

[chimneys]

6,000,000 murdered in the concentration camps.

Putting that into perspective - we all remember the poppies at The Tower of London representing the fallen during WW1.

Now times that by 6.

And still there are Holocaust deniers.

And please spare a thought for the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders bringing the total to approximately ELEVEN million. Unimaginable!

 

[Lord Bracknell]

There was a discussion on Radio 4 earlier today, about the fact that the Daily Telegraph had carried a report as early as 1942 to the effect that 700,000 Jews had been murdered in Poland by the Nazis. But this story failed to make the front page of the paper and was largely ignored by other media, including the BBC. The discussion centred on the apparent fact that it was very odd that nobody noticed the story, which was the first mention in the British press of anything resembling the holocaust.

This got me thinking too. And I regret to say that I wondered whether the fact that nobody seemed bothered at the time was because the story was "only" about Jews. Is it wrong to imagine that anti-semitism was institutionally entrenched in British society even during the war? And that the horror that we have today for the holocaust might be something that took a good few years after 1945 to take hold?

 

[Franks Wild Years]

There was a discussion on Radio 4 earlier today, about the fact that the Daily Telegraph had carried a report as early as 1942 to the effect that 700,000 Jews had been murdered in Poland by the Nazis. But this story failed to make the front page of the paper and was largely ignored by other media, including the BBC. The discussion centred on the apparent fact that it was very odd that nobody noticed the story, which was the first mention in the British press of anything resembling the holocaust.

This got me thinking too. And I regret to say that I wondered whether the fact that nobody seemed bothered at the time was because the story was "only" about Jews. Is it wrong to imagine that anti-semitism was institutionally entrenched in British society even during the war? And that the horror that we have today for the holocaust might be something that took a good few years after 1945 to take hold?

Sadly Lord B , I think thats exactly why none bothered.

 

[Leekbrookgull]

Maybe my post will upset some people,but we now live in an age where 'medicine' can control 'Gender Selection' even the colour of eyes,hair,height etc and that frightens me as a father of two straping lads we are both happy with what Nature has given us,yes 'take-out' genes that carry illness,but 'Gender Selection' was not Mengele doing the same ? In a gruesome and barbaric way.