God is on trial - BBC 2 Play on now

[Cheeky Monkey]

I kind of know where you're coming from Buzzer.
I am currently reading The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert. Its a huge volume documenting the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis (as well as the other various eastern european citizens) against the Jews during WW2, and after a while, the stats just get mind-boggling. I'm reading it, I'm taking it in, but I'm struggling to comprehend the sheer numbers involved because the massacres are so widespread and so numerous.

I FEEL I should be more horrified....and reading the numbers, I should be. But I can't quite connect with it. I don't know what it is. I think I'd have to visit one of the death camps to really bring it home (but I'm not sure I'd want to).

The definitive Holocaust history. I read it when I was a teenager, but admittedly just because I wanted to read about the gore and atrocities. I wonder how many others on here have an 'unhealthy' interest in the Holocaust? I mean do people really make a Auschwitz a holiday destination because they want to honour the memories and 'never forget' or is it really just macabre fascination that drives them to visit the death camps?

 

[Cheeky Monkey]

Fair point, but not ALL the jews arrived at Auschwitz starving and malnourished. And some wern't alive there long enough to ever reach that condition.

Fair point too.

 

[Easy 10]

I have to admit there is an element of ghoulish fascination in the subject.

 

[MattBackHome]

I kind of know where you're coming from Buzzer.
I am currently reading The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert. Its a huge volume documenting the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis (as well as the other various eastern european citizens) against the Jews during WW2, and after a while, the stats just get mind-boggling. I'm reading it, I'm taking it in, but I'm struggling to comprehend the sheer numbers involved because the massacres are so widespread and so numerous.

I FEEL I should be more horrified....and reading the numbers, I should be. But I can't quite connect with it. I don't know what it is. I think I'd have to visit one of the death camps to really bring it home (but I'm not sure I'd want to).

Totally agree - and I remember Martin Gilbert making the same sort of point in one of his other books (Krystallnacht, which should be read by everyone as a lesson in how these things begin to escalate into utter disaster). To be fair, no level of horror you (or I) express at the numbers will do it justice, I think that's the point; it's incomprehensible.

 

[Soton Seagull]

I went to Auschwitz in April whilst saying in Krakow. Auschwitz itself is more of a museum, which lessens the eerieness. That said, the photos, particuarly of the kids that Mengles experimented on are pretty tough viewing. In addition, the truly massive cabinets full of human hair, prosthetic limbs & people's suitcases (with names and addresses on the front) stop you in your tracks.

When visiting you get the free shuttle bus over to Berkinau. This place got me a lot more. The sheer vastness of layout and the infamous railway track where prisoners were met by 'Doctors' who decided whether you were fit for work. If you were, you were sent left and gassed within hours; to the right and you were made to do hardl abour on a low calorie diet. Literally worked to death. I remember discussing which way would I want to be sent? Birkenau has collapsed gas chambers, trashed by the Nazis as the Russians headed their way so that they could deny what they'd been up to. A very uncomfortable place to walk around.

The thing that has always fascinated me is the ability to people to look the other way and also to be taken in by Hitler & co. 'The Hitler myth' by Ian Kershaw is a very interesting read on the subject. I also recommend 'The Dictators' by Richard Overy, which compares & contrasts Hitler and Stalin's reign.

All in all Auschwitz just brings home that humans are not civilised creatures; we simply find more efficient ways to keep killing each other.

 

[Uncle Buck]

I would like to know if anybody has been to Hiroshima/Nagasaki? I am currently writing the dissertation for my masters' degree on this subject, and wondered if anybody has been and whether it was worthwhile.

Have been to the Peace Museum in Hiroshima. It is worth doing, very well done and balanced. However the thing that stuck with me was one of the last exhibits you see on your way out, is a full scale model of after the bomb has detonated and it is of children with skin hanging off their arms.

 

[hans kraay fan club]

I went to Auschwitz in April whilst saying in Krakow. Auschwitz itself is more of a museum, which lessens the eerieness. That said, the photos, particuarly of the kids that Mengles experimented on are pretty tough viewing. In addition, the truly massive cabinets full of human hair, prosthetic limbs & people's suitcases (with names and addresses on the front) stop you in your tracks.

When visiting you get the free shuttle bus over to Berkinau. This place got me a lot more. The sheer vastness of layout and the infamous railway track where prisoners were met by 'Doctors' who decided whether you were fit for work. If you were, you were sent left and gassed within hours; to the right and you were made to do hardl abour on a low calorie diet. Literally worked to death. I remember discussing which way would I want to be sent? Birkenau has collapsed gas chambers, trashed by the Nazis as the Russians headed their way so that they could deny what they'd been up to. A very uncomfortable place to walk around.
.

Absolutely bang on. This was my experience EXACTLY.

Auschwitz, was horrible, but quite interesting. Birkenau was a terrible, terrible place and really upset me. They show you inside one of the barrack huts and explain that 300 people would have been housed there [it is 'fit' for about 50]. Then you go outside and see the foundations where previously there were hundreds and hundreds more of the same huts. The scale is ridiculous, and the place just feels miserable.

You hear stories about the grass not growing back [starving inmates were reduced to EATING it, during their incarceration] and there being no birds there. Its all true.

 

[lost in london]

I'd be interested to know whether people who have been to places like Auschwitz feel that they have been changed as a result of going. The point made by someone above about it perhaps being more ghoulish fascination that makes people go there seems probably right to me, and I doubt that many people have been changed.

The attrocities in Darfur haven't really stirred many people into action, which I would have thought they would have had they been to a place like Auschwitz and come back a different person as a result.

I'm not preaching here, just interested to see what people think.

 

[Behind Enemy Lines]

I went to Auschwitz in April whilst saying in Krakow. Auschwitz itself is more of a museum, which lessens the eerieness. That said, the photos, particuarly of the kids that Mengles experimented on are pretty tough viewing. In addition, the truly massive cabinets full of human hair, prosthetic limbs & people's suitcases (with names and addresses on the front) stop you in your tracks.

When visiting you get the free shuttle bus over to Berkinau. This place got me a lot more. The sheer vastness of layout and the infamous railway track where prisoners were met by 'Doctors' who decided whether you were fit for work. If you were, you were sent left and gassed within hours; to the right and you were made to do hardl abour on a low calorie diet. Literally worked to death. I remember discussing which way would I want to be sent? Birkenau has collapsed gas chambers, trashed by the Nazis as the Russians headed their way so that they could deny what they'd been up to. A very uncomfortable place to walk around.

The thing that has always fascinated me is the ability to people to look the other way and also to be taken in by Hitler & co. 'The Hitler myth' by Ian Kershaw is a very interesting read on the subject. I also recommend 'The Dictators' by Richard Overy, which compares & contrasts Hitler and Stalin's reign.

All in all Auschwitz just brings home that humans are not civilised creatures; we simply find more efficient ways to keep killing each other.

"Hitler's Willing Executioners" by Daniel Goldenhagan is another book which details how many ordinary Germans must have known what was going on but couldn't or wouldn't do anything. Interesting point you make about finding more efficient ways to kill people. During the first few months of the "Final Solution" the murders were carried out by firing squads. The Nazis had to find a more "efficient" method as the German soldiers complained, not against the policy, rather they found it too distressing to be so "close" to killing of so many. Thus a more effective method had to be found. The gas chamber was an invention to help remove this trauma from the killers whilst of course allowing them to go and murder in numbers previously unimaginable.

 

[Lord Large]

I thought it was well acted but the setting looked a bit fake to me.

I think when this subject matter gets done well it is unbelievably powerful. The downside of this means that when it is done well, but perhaps not amazingly, you are perhaps left feeling a little let down.

Acting was good but I thought it didn't have the lasting power of some of the better programmes or books on the subject.

 

[Cheeky Monkey]

I thought it was well acted but the setting looked a bit fake to me.

In the credits at the end it said that the interior scenes were all filmed in a chalet at Butlins, Bognor Regis. Once filming had wrapped, a holocaust survivor who advised on the making of the play commented that the food and general living conditions at Auschwitz compared favourably with the south coast holiday camp.

 

[Couldn't Be Hyypia]

I thought the Jerry Springer "Who Do You Think You Are" on a couple of weeks ago gave a tiny glimpse into what individual people might have gone through. He traced his German family and they were pretty much all exterminated. Watching him follow the route and have their last hours explained to him was very moving.

Sadly - desperately - it's people who won't change. Look at some of the Serb/Croat atrocities (the descriptions of dropping living people into wood pulpers will always stay with me).

There have always been genuinely evil people and sadly they can exploit the fact that most of us are not strong or brave enough to step out of line to object.