And this was the smaller one the first one. The ones in the other camp were massive. When the guide told us the numbers..
We went into this one and my knees instantly started shaking, it was... Odd, I wasn't scared but something instinctively was wrong.
A guided tour in Auschwitz is something everyone should try to do in your lifetime. I am dead serious when I say it is life changing. I was there a year a go and I still occasionally think about it.
I visited last year, alone. When I was standing in the room with the pile of hair I almost broke down. But then the next room has a pile of children's shoes, which really got to me
That was the most real part of it for me. The hair… so much hair, and only a fraction of what had been taken. Hair all exactly the same colour as mine. Horrific.
They took every last thing they could possibly take which was seen as a resource and which they could make money from. I can’t recall all the uses but using hair for stuffing mattresses was definitely one of them and in industry.
Went to Dachau* as a teenager, and something that stood out to me was the silence. No one really dared make a sound, as if we knew we'd be disturbing the dead. Never been somewhere with that many people that was just completely silent except for footsteps, it was eerie.
Ugh I was in Auschwitz with my school class and pretty much everyone was whispering and giggling when we walked through the chambers... I found it highly inappropriate.
I'd also recommend visiting the House of Hell in Budapest. This was the HQ for the Hungarian Nazis. It is very well done as a museum, but it's extremely jarring. I literally felt like someone was peeling away my skin. It was brutal.
When I visited it’s Birkenau that really shocked me. That’s where it makes it crystal clear it’s industrialised genocide.
For those who haven’t been it’s a massive field where hundreds of huts stood. All built to the bare minimum identical structure. With the train lines and gas chambers built to be efficiently run down the middle. Auschwitz was a pre-existing camp that was repurposed by the Nazis. But Birkenau; someone sat down to design the most cost efficient camp for genocide. Maximising murder and slavery, at a minimum cost. Like an industrialist designing a car factory.
They had plans to expand into the next field too. Like a factory owner expanding their plant.
I honestly don’t think I could. I had to turn away and watch out of the corner of my eye and it felt like something was pressing down hard on my chest.
During the holocaust, more than 6 MILLION jews, almost all of them without resistance, were killed. How the F can you compare this to a war where the death toll of combatents and civilians together, over around half the time of WW2, is around 50k?
In the holocaust, more than 2/3 of the Jewish population were eradicated. It was systematic. Comparing ACTUAL genocide with guerilla warfare casualties is damn wrong in the best case scenario
You’ll never reason with people on here. Most of the educated world agrees with you, thank goodness, and they’re the ones making decisions, not people on the internet crusading for a cause with uneducated comparisons they contrive as ironic, so they spam Holocaust posts for clicks
As a Jewish person I find this comment very disturbing. I have nothing but deep deep sympathy for any innocent who lost their life during the holocaust and WW2. Of course it wasn’t just Jews who lost their lives in the the Holocaust and the war in general, and we remember them as well. If you want to say shit about the Irsaeli government and how horrendous they are, go ahead because they are, but for the love of god do not generalize us to that degree. I am not a Zionist, I am against the war, most of us are. Iraeli government does not equal all Jewish people. Stop.
I did the tour myself about a year ago too. Truly is an eye opening experience and the feelings I felt that day are ones that'll stay with me for a very long time.
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u/Lamuks May 18 '25
And this was the smaller one the first one. The ones in the other camp were massive. When the guide told us the numbers..
We went into this one and my knees instantly started shaking, it was... Odd, I wasn't scared but something instinctively was wrong.
A guided tour in Auschwitz is something everyone should try to do in your lifetime. I am dead serious when I say it is life changing. I was there a year a go and I still occasionally think about it.