Holocaust Memorial Day

When you think of all the recent incidents of mass genocide over just the last 100 years......humans can so easily become awful, awful people.

 

To Dalestyke:

Yes well I would give an opinion on recent Russian leadership but got to get the wife's tea ready. Otherwise another war.

 

Talk about folk being brainwashed too!!!!!

it’s hard to even begin to think what actually went through there minds.......both the Germans and the Jews

 

Dachau was very sobering and even though it was nearly 50 years ago that I went, I can still vividly see the sculpture of human bones inside the camp with the words Nie Wieder, Never Again in umpteen languages. More recently I visited Auschwitz and that really brought it home to me. The Nazis tried to destroy the evidence as they were losing the war but even though they managed to destroy 90% of it there's still so much evidence left behind to make you think. Piles and piles of human hair, false teeth, wooden legs, spectacles, shoes etc. What really hit me was a display cabinet about 20 yards long full of shoes. What brought a tear to my eye was the sight of a tiny pair of red shoes, probably from a 3 or 4 year old girl. I have a granddaughter that age so it hit home. Although it may be traumatic, I think the youth of today should be made to visit Auschwitz to understand the horrors that war can bring.

 

My friend went the other year and said the same thing about the little shoes.

As I've said, I've read and studied a lot of that period of history but I don't think I could go. Doesn't mean I don't appreciate the horrors of the time.

 

o/t to your post.....
recent t v programme (posted about it on another recent thread) claimed that neither the British nor the U S Governments were aware of the existence of the Concentration camps until late 1944. Surprised about that - would have thought information would have got out well befor then - what do you reckon?

 

loads of things in the war, that were awful, millions of people starved to death in occupied countries as food ran out, women raped and often shot afterwards ,only 75 years ago too

 

I'm almost certain they did. 1944 seems very late. I think people in general shut their eyes and ears to it. A quick Google

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...-us-uk-soviets-secret-documents-a7688036.html

https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/chapter-9/what-did-world-know

 

I think you’re spot on with that Helen. It goes on to this day. I wonder if we’re more horrified by the Holocaust because of the industrial scale, meticulous planning and the perpetrators looked like us.

As an aside, I’ve never bought into the theory that it’s only certain peoples or certain countries that are pre disposed to these sort of crimes. There are not many Countries in the world that don’t have blood on their hands through history. That’s why its so important to call it out where we see it happening. Or where we think the seeds are fermenting.

 

Years ago, in an old junkshop, I came across a slim faded book titled “The Nazi New Order in Poland.” It was published in London in 1941.

It gives detailed eye witness accounts of mass executions of Jews and Poles, some dating back to the very first days of the war in 1939. It also gives accounts of conditions in ghettoes and ‘concentration camps’ including Oswiecim (later renamed Auschwitz.) At the time it hadn’t become an industrialised death camp but the detail of what was going on is just as harrowing.

This book has a warning on the front cover. NOT FOR SALE TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC. Who it was meant for I don’t know (it had no Government identification) but it’s pretty clear the man in the street wasn’t to know. There were reasons for this.

Have you ever heard of a man called Jan Karski? He should be known by everyone but he isn’t. Karski was a young Polish soldier who was captured and tortured by the Gestapo then escaped to become a courier for the Polish Underground. With the help of Jews, he was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and the death camp of Belzec.

In 1943 he was smuggled out to Britain and then America to personally report to both Churchill and Roosevelt. He gave a detailed account of what he’s seen and stated that without help, the Jews in Poland would be exterminated.

Google his name and you can watch interviews with him on YouTube. A remarkable man and a tragic story.

"I wanted to save millions, and I was not able to save one man.”

 

The British Empire is a prime example.... All of our wealth was built on the backs of slaves and enslaved peoples.

 

I agree with you but extermination camps were on another level. A conveyor belt of destruction of human life. They were murdering so many in Auschwitz that they couldn't cope with the sheer number of dead bodies which were piling up despite inmates burying and burning bodies constantly.

 

Maybe, but the British Empire did it for 200 years, the Nazis managed less than a decade. It would be interesting to see what the estimated totals of slaves taken by our forefathers was. I suspect there's not a lot of difference. Perhaps the biggest difference would be the numbers of people born into slavery. Actually no, the real difference was the motivation, where the Nazis did it for racial hatred, the British Empire did it purely for wealth, we treated peoples from the rest of the world with indifference or as commercial assets.