Wednesday 9 April 2014

A-Z Blogging Challenge - Holocaust Memorials

During my visits to Germany and Poland, I have visited several concentration camps. Some people think these places should be obliterated, but personally I think they act as a memorial to the millions who lost their lives here during World War Two. I’ve visited different ones at different times, but always found them a sobering reminder of man’s inhumanity.
The first camp I visited was Auschwitz-Birkenau, and I will never forget my first sight of the watchtower and the arch through which the ‘transports’ passed into the camp.


The sheer size of the camp was mind-blowing too, stretching nearly a mile into the distance to where the gas chambers were situated (and have now been demolished).

It was a beautiful spring day when I first visited Auschwitz, and somehow that didn't seem right. You tend to imagine the camp in monochrome because of the photos you've seen, but when I was part way down this rail track, we heard a train's hooter somewhere in the distance, and the hairs on my neck stood on end.

The Auschwitz Labour Camp (as distinct from Birkenau, the death camp) was a couple of miles away, and again the entrance seemed only too familiar, with the inscription ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (work makes you free). The barrack blocks that housed the workers were surrounded by electric fences, and the displays of suitcases, shoes, pots and pans, steel-rimmed spectacles, prayer shawls (and Zyklon B  cyanide canisters) in one of the blocks were heartrending, reminding you of all the people who lost their lives here.


There is very little left of the Bergen-Belsen camp, near to the town of Celle in Northern Germany, apart from the mass graves and various memorials.
This is the Jewish memorial, which reads: ‘Israel and the world shall remember 30,000 Jews exterminated in the concentration camp of Bergen Belsen at the hands of the murderous Nazis.’ It was erected on April 15, 1946, the first anniversary of the liberation of the camp. There is another memorial that commemorates the camp’s other victims – gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political opponents of the Nazis.
One memorial at Belsen attracts especial attention – that of Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who both died there about a month before the camp was liberated. The long mound in the background (left centre of the photo) is one of the mass graves.

Sachsenhausen Camp, near Berlin, was established in 1936, was mainly a transit camp, and also a training camp for S.S. officers who were then deployed to other camps. Between 1936 and 1945, about 200,000 people passed through the camp, and about 100,000 died there as a result of exhaustion, disease, malnutrition or because of brutal medical experimentation. The gate to the camp had the usual ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ words.

In the large roll-call area, now with a memorial wall denoting the shapes of the barrack buildings, there were shoe-testing tracks – areas with different surfaces, gravel, cinders, large stones etc. Prisoners had to march round these all day, testing the soles of army boots to see what type performed the best.

Finally, Dachau Camp, near Munich, which was established in 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, was a camp for political prisoners. Over 200,000 from all over Europe were imprisoned here, and more than 43,000 of them died. The barrack blocks were designed to hold 200 prisoners but, by the end of the war, each barrack was catastrophically overcrowded with up to 2,000 people.

'Arbeit Macht Frei' takes on a bitter and tragic meaning, as a result.



All these sites remind us of an atrocity that should never be forgotten.  

11 comments:

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    1. I think it was all the steel-rimmed spectacles that got to me, plus all the suitcases labelled with names and addresses.

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  2. There is something morbid about a concentration camp. Germany is not the only ones that had them. We all had them, Canada and U.S. Japan, we all had them during the war. Some still have them, now called refugee camps.

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    1. I don't we or any other country have killed millions of people in gas chambers, Michael. Yes, there have been other examples of genocide, but not on the scale of the 'Final Solution'.

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    2. I agree with Paula. Yes, there are other places where inhumane acts have taken place, but you can't compare these refugee camps to the concentration camps.

      http://joycelansky.blogspot.com/2014/04/atoz-i-am-not-spoilt.html

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    3. I agree with Paula and Joyce. An unimaginable number on a scale far greater.

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  3. Thank you for a reminder of what we should never forget. I've been to Holocaust Museums and find the silence of these places to be eery. The last time I went to the Washington DC museum, I got so upset that I decided I would never go back. My son has been to Auschwitz. After the visit, his black friend was harassed by ignorant Poles at a soccer game. Just a reminder that it's not over.

    http://joycelansky.blogspot.com/2014/04/atoz-i-am-not-spoilt.html

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    1. It's so sad that racial hatred still exists. Seems like we never learn from history.
      Thanks for visiting, Joyce.

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  4. Our son Abram visited Auschwitz on a trip after his senior year of school. It became a haunting memory for him. When he was younger, we visited the Washington DC museum and he followed the adult track with us. His "person" was a homosexual (Abram came out a few years after). The mix of the two was memorials was life changing for him.

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    1. I don't think anyone can ever forget a visit to Auschwitz, and it obviously had a huge impact on your son, Amy.

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  5. Sachsenhausen Camp 2009; it touched my life. I took a picture of myself standing next to one of the largest trees I could find. It was weird thinking how that tree was there to see all those atrocities during those years and then on one particular day in the summer of '09...me.

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