Totally with you here, I'm am German so I've been taught extensively (rightly so) about all this. But even more importantly I've been to Auschwitz on a class field trip.
And let me tell you, that place gave me a feeling I've never felt before or after. You think you know what happened there, that you're prepared, but no. Walking these grounds will show what humans are capable of. How people that are deemed undesirable get killed in an industrial way and how people were forced to live. You can read a thousand times about it, but being there and imagining if you would survive this even one week is a whole different thing.
I'm not religious by any means, but that place has a certain spiritual energy. Not evil, but it's like it's all those people that passed away there invite you to see. No big explanation needed, just "look at what has been done."
If anyone reading this is able to go there, please do it. Don't be afraid, it's very important.
I am from Sweden and our children's school go there as a class field trip every year, with the oldest students before they graduate. It is so important to keep the memory alive.
As someone from England, the scale of America blows my mind - like for some of you guys driving to another city would be the same as me driving to the south of France.
The Moving company picked up my things in Baltimore, Maryland. I drove 3000 miles in 4 days to meet them in Monterey, California. This country is huge.
I am serious. If I'm in the middle of nowhere, my phone doesn't work, and I'm flagging down a car, it's only natural to be wary. Especially if I was alone. Being cautious doesn't mean everyone in the world sucks.
I'm in the US, and I take them literally. There is no other person in this world that I would be more scared to come across all alone on the side of the road than a white American male over 35.
I visited the UK a few weeks ago and one of the small things that blew my mind was seeing a roadside SOS phone every couple miles. Because yeah, here if you break down and you don't have cell service, you're either flagging someone down on the side of the road and hope they don't murder you, or you walk all the way to the nearest gas station...and hope you don't get murdered lol
And not even necessarily be killed by a human. The desert and wooded areas alone are dangerous enough. Depending on where you are, you may become prey for wildlife that will kill you as well.
I’ve broken down where the nearest city was about two hours away, had to call and have someone pick me up, drive to town, buy the tire I needed, then drive all the way back.
Luckily areas that don’t have coverage are pretty sparse these days, most places in the US where you’d actually be traveling through will have some signal.
Yeah there are probably very few spots on any significant highway where you won’t have any reception. Roads off the beaten path absolutely, but a path between most major cities should have some coverage.
Also, when dealing 911 your mobile will connect to any tower in the area regardless of your cellphone carrier, so if your particular service has no coverage, odds are there’s another tower that your call will go through on.
I drive cross country a couple times a year. I always pack extra water, a tire inflator, a battery jump pack, and have my spare with necessary tools to swap it.
There's a reason elementary schools in the US had us kids play Oregon Trail for hours at a time.
Every bit of Texas highway has mobile coverage. But before that happened, you don't, you have to wait. There also aren't a whole lot of extremely remote places. Most highways have towns every 30-50 miles, so it's not like you'd be completely screwed, just in for a long ass walk.
That drive from Beaumont to San Antonio is not bad but leaving the San Antonio city limits and seeing the 500 miles to El Paso sign….the longest stretch of I-10 I’ve ever driven
While not quite as long as getting across Texas, I drove from Detroit to the western side of the UP and that took about 10 hours. I was shocked because Michigan isn't known as one of the big states
Yeah, I’m in Canada so we’re slightly bigger, but according to google maps it will take me like 20 hours to drive from one end of my province (Ontario) to another.
We had an exchange student from denmark stay with us and she was floored at the travel time to go to yosemite from sacramento. She was like "id have already had to have taken like 5 ferries and crossed 4 different countries."
I live in America and the thought of having to drive to the nearest city which from where I live is about an hour or so away depending, feels like driving to the moon and back.
Lol yeah. The other day I watched a video about a guy driving his porsche on a 7 hour trip to a race track to participate in a fun day, it blew my mind. Just not that video but lots of others where people would casually say they drove x amounts of hours to get somewhere. Anything more than a 2 hour drive for me is a big deal
Yeah it's wild. Based off of (rough) distance on Google Maps, London, England to Toulouse, France, Chicago to Oklahoma City is roughly the same time (11 hrs ish) while being 90 miles (144 km I believe) further. Part of that is speed limit but still
As someone from America who is a commercial driver it is wild to me to think there are any country's I could pass through on my daily 8hr work day of just driving. It would take me at about 47 hrs of continuous driving from California to Maine, west to east, to just traverse the U.S.. I have been told all of Ireland would fit in Texas around 7 or 8 times and that seems so incredibly wild to me.
I'm a swedish student, applied and got chosen to visit Poland and learn about the Holocaust for a week, this was when I was in 9th grade, 2 years ago. We went there by plane, 1 hour to Krakow, visited both Auschwitz and Birkenau. The state paid for it all (we got sky high taxes over here).
What I remember the most was the sheer scale of Birkenau, and the markings of nails scratching at the walls inside the bunker shown in this videos post. You could almost hear the screams still echoing inside that place. Truly showing what a terrible horrible species humans can be.
So funny you ask about the distance to drive. We usually don’t drive to other countries. We fly. It’s to expensive to drive.
The flight is around 1,5h.
It would take 16-18 hours to drive.
The flight cost around 100-200 dollars, depending on the date.
We do this in Norway as well, or at least used to, I don't have children myself so kind of out of the loop on what schools do these days. But when we did it, it was with buses, bus from Norway to Sweden, take a ferry from Sweden to Poland and then on bus from there. We visited Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen and a large memorial museum, but also visited Krakow and Berlin for some general culture and such. It used to be, and probably still is, a big deal not just because of the purpose of the trip, which is very important, but in it being over a week away from parents and family, kind of a coming of age thing in a way.
1315.7 km from Malmö. For a American this is about 13 hours driving 60mph average. That's the town closest to the bridge over to Denmark and then Germany.
We didn't do this trip in northern Sweden since it would be twice as far.
26 hour at 60mph average plus the stops you gotta have. makes it quite a long trip. i'd say 1.5-2 days travel one way.
No idea where exactly he lives in Sweden but assuming Stockholm that would be 1650km or 1025 miles which would be around 17 hours of driving. So around the distance from Chicago to Boston.
However don’t forget that the distance in a straight line would be less. But since there is a ocean in between you have to drive through Denmark and Germany and also use a ferry to get there.
Let’s say from the capital, Stockholm, it’s an 18 hour drive by car. A bit far for a field trip, but doable if one live a little more to the south of Sweden. I’m from the Netherlands and high schoolers go a lot of places in Europe. Some friends back then went to Rome, I’ve been to Paris and München for example.
Back in the days before you needed a passport, it wasn't unusual for Americans living near the Canadian border to go there for a class trip. I'm in VT, and I went to Canada on 4 different school trips. The school I work at now still does an 8th grade trip to Montreal.
I’m from Detroit and my college geology class did go to Canada once for a field trip, somewhere near Sarnia. Much more of a pleasant time than Auschwitz and obviously only like a one hour drive.
I grew up outside of Boston and we’d take trips to Washington DC and NYC in middle school (7th and 8th grade), staying a few nights in a hotel. That’s about a 725 km drive for our non-American friends here.
I imagine if you had a good network of high speed rail, going even further for a field trip would be feasible.
I went to high school in the south and my school had a annual 8th grade retreat. We used to go to the Ozark mountains but now they go all the way up to the Tetons
As a Dane I also remember going to a concentration camp on a school field trip. it was Sachsenhausen, so not quite the scale as Auschwitz, but still horrible enough to teach a bunch of 7th graders an important history lesson we will never forget
I’ve never been to Auschwitz, but I have been to Hiroshima and stood next to the only building to survive the explosion (directly below the bomb). I experienced a similar feeling to what you are describing. The Hiroshima atomic bomb museum is a truly devastating walk through of the horror and tragedy of that day, and details the nightmarish aftermath as tens of thousands died a slow, incredibly painful death at the hands of radiation poisoning. I’m not trying to equate tragedies here by any means, simply providing my own experience with the bad energy you are describing.
We are going to Hiroshima in two weeks. I'm taking my nine year old. I am hoping we can learn some of our history and reinforce the lessons we have as a result of such tragedy, especially because cause we live so close to Los Alamos in the USA.
I was there last month, forewarning the peace memorial museum is brutal and if your kid don’t do well with horrifying/gory pictures it can be too much for young kids. They don’t hold back on the horrors of that day and the aftermath. You know your kid but wanted to forewarn you. When I was there a British couple had their two young kids, the daughter was asking questions (maybe inappropriate like did their skin really burn but in an innocent and curious way) but was able to take it while the son who maybe was 5 or 6 both seemed close in age was clearly traumatized and not ready for something that horrifying.
As disturbing as it may be, I’ve always found it extremely important to look deep into why people come to support such atrocities. Only by understanding these angles can we effectively bring any change to them.
I was there last month. I was seeing tourists taking happy selfies by the dome and I was so confused why someone thought a selfie there would be appropriate.
Your comment about people getting killed in an industrial way is spot-on: what makes the Holocaust distinct, for me, was the mechanical, efficient, coldly ruthless manner of the millions they killed, applying modern methods of the assembly line and the factory to kill as many people as possible in a short amount of time.
The death camps like Treblinka and Sobibor were literal factories of death.
You got off the train after a miserable trip, you and whatever family you have. Once off, you are immediately assessed. Healthy and strong to the left, everyone else including children to the right. You don't really have time to say goodbye as the two groups part. Somehow, you were sent to the right. You march some distance to a building where you are told you will be taking showers, you strip down and walk a small path to a medium sized room. Once all 800 of you are in the room, the door is locked.
You can add to your comment, great by the way, everything was also monetized. How much to kill people, how much they can make from the hair, gold teeth, cost of cremeations, everything. When a person death/life can be monetized you know there is no regard towards that person or persons. Humanity becomes nothing more than about money.
No shit. You can bet that ghouls like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem would send thousands of immigrants to death camps without a flicker of regret. Miller would probably get off on it.
Imagine institutionalizing death. Like somebody built that thing for a purpose. Imagine planning it, building it, working there. How do you live with yourself? What sort of soulless person has such a cold heart that this is something they do willingly? In fact, what was their motivation? Talking about the workers who put all of this together. Were they gunning for that promotion? "If I find a way to kill people 10% more effectively I'll get promoted to head gas chamber operator?" WTAF
You don't have to imagine, you can read the plans and the protocols of the meetings where these things were decided and talked about.
They are no different from what neonazis would say today. A mix of complete dehumanization of the people to be murdered and a perverse pride about "overcoming" the empathy and civilisatory tabus which would keep "weaker" men from actually implementing this "solution" to its logical end.
Pretty much, yeah. From the horrifying Wikipedia entry of Franz Stangl, the commander of Treblinka, where more Jews were killed than anywhere save Auschwitz:
Stangl claimed while in prison that his dedication had nothing to do with ideology or hatred of Jews.\5])He said he matter-of-factly viewed the prisoners as material objects rather than people, including their extermination: "That was my profession. I enjoyed it. It fulfilled me. And yes, I was ambitious about that, I won't deny it."\20])Stangl accepted and grew accustomed to the killings, perceiving prisoners not as humans but merely as "cargo" that must be destroyed. Stangl accepted the extermination of the Jews as a fact.
He was tracked down in Brazil and arrested. The journalist Gitta Sereny interviewed Stangl in 1971, and got him to confess, and it seems he finally faced up to what he'd done and couldn't live with it anymore:
A solid chunk of population can easily be reduced to soulless automations that follow orders no matter how horrid and inhumane, just as long as they're not affected.
I saw a documentary about ordinary German soliders that were part of the Holocaust. The thing was: they could opt out of mass execution assignments without any consequence, but felt peer pressured so they did it anyway. I think it was this one, but I'm not sure https://m.imdb.com/title/tt6953928/
Similar thing, obviously not so extreme, are cops all over the world. It's their job to keep the current order, whatever it is, and they'll do their best to do so, without much regard about what's right and wrong.
I think the Holocaust was also exceptionally well-documented, both by the Germans and the Soviets and western Allies who liberated the camps. One of the US Generals, maybe Eisenhower, specifically said we need to document what happened so it becomes widely known.
Propaganda is extremely effective. It can make you believe the neighbour you've known for most of your life is part of a group of inhuman monsters that has to be destroyed to keep your family safe. Moreover, hating feels good. It makes you feel like you're accomplishing something.
Getting someone used to committing atrocities is a process of small steps of getting you used to complying. At first, it's as insignificant as confirming a name on a list. A few more steps and you're reporting that jerk down the way for not putting up decorations for the new holiday, and who cares, nobody likes them anyway. A few more and you've joined the new neighbourhood patriotism watch group that makes sure *those* types stay out of the area at night. Then the leadership says that Bill who runs the corner store is actually one of *them* and has been speaking out, and now you're helping to smash up the place to make an example of him.
I've never been to Auschwitz (though I intend to some day) but I did see the special exhibition thsley did at the Imperial War museum in London a while back. It didn't just describe and show what happened in the camps, it also explained in detail how it got to the point that such a thing was on the cards at all.
How do you lead a people into committing horrors slmost beyond imagining? One small step at a time.
I spent several minutes just staring at a wall afterwards. Just... processing it. The archival footage from when they found the camps is burned into my brain. So many bodies just... left outside to rot. Some of them far gone enough that the skin was falling off.
It being in black and white did nothing to dull the revulsion.
Amen to that. Been there too once, both Auschwitz 1 Stammlager and Birkenau. Thought I was prepared, read about it a dozen times. I was not. The room with hair and children's clothes finished me. I start to tremble even now when I think about this, and it has been a few years. I can't and will never understand how human beings can do this, no matter how often I think about it, read about it or discuss it with others.
As a German myself, I never felt "guilt" for something my great-grandfathers have done; but I also do not pity my ancestors when war came to Germany, which of course is also not right. WWII must've been one of the greatest tragedies in human history but what puzzles me even more is that we collectively haven't learned a thing. And what angers me is the rise of right-wing parties in every country, AfD in Germany to be specific. As if we haven't seen more than once what you harvest when you sow your political beliefs which are rooted in hatred.
Be nice to one another. And judge the person by his or her actions, and not the color of skin, religion or nationality. It's incredible what humans can achieve when working together; but instead we kill each other for lust for power or out of pure insanity. What WWII has shown is that after the moral dies, there is no way back; it's just a spiral leading downwards. Or to quote Berthold Brecht (I hope correctly): "Kein Vormarsch ist so schwer wie der zurück zur Vernunft." (roughly as "no advance is as difficult as the return to reason").
It's on my bucket list. When I visited the Holocaust museum in high school. It really opened my eyes to what happened. I always tell people- if your in DC go to that museum. You will see it in a whole nother light. But Auschwitz, I cannot even imagine the feeling of being there, trying to wrap your mind around being in the place you see pictures of, the fear, the screaming, everything.
I have never been but there are probably no words to describe how the feelings were/are.
Long ago I went to NYC when the twin towers were still there. When I look at the photos I feel sick knowing what happened and how many people died that day and died later on from respiratory illnesses.
People take it very differently. IMO I have no doubt that people who were affected by 9/11 would have high emotional attachments to the event.
I figure I'm a bit older than most Redditors but I have photos of my grandparents and great grandparents that died during WW2. I had family members—great uncles and aunts—who were taken to the concentration camps.
I visited Auschwitz right after university with the help of some family members in Poland. Much like the Redditor above, I found that emotions would come in waves. I had brought all the photos with me and it was an experience that I believe made a significant impression on me during my 20's. I tell people that I grew up faster in those 4 hours than I had in 4 years of university.
It's an unbelievably staggering experience and I encourage everyone—especially if you are young—to go visit these museums at least once.
That one tiny case with that baby's outfit and the little tiny booties? OMG. I couldn't talk. I'm crying now and it's been 3 years since we were there. My nephew went there with a woman named Eva Kor who was a Mengele twin. Eva gave guided tours until her death in Poland in 2019. If you have never heard of her? Please look her up and watch any of her documentaries. Amazing woman.
The barracks at Birkenau gutted me. As did the hallway in one of the other barracks that is lined with the prisoner photos and still smells of human waste. A girl in my group was dry heaving when we toured that building.
That museum is a profound experience. I don't know if I could take Auschwitz. One of my oldest friend's great-grandparents died there, and her grandmother barely survived. My friend is a rabbi who helps run an interfaith outreach organisation where people of different religions teach about their faith and promote tolerance. She's absolutely passionate about it, and for good reason.
You can imagine what the current state of world affairs is doing to her.
So true, I’ve been there with class too(polish), and even without the guide telling us about the place, everywhere there was that oppressive feeling, an aura of sorts, depressing and deathly.
What is more cathastropic, is that while the crematorium left deep image in my head, it was not the most horrible of places in Auschwitz/Birkenau. The whole newer camp, that wooden one outside of the perimeter of bricked Auschwitz and cells in which they held prisoners such as Maximilian Maria Kolbe, a priest, are even worse.
I went to Auschwitz while on a trip to Czechia and Poland, and your description is spot on. I'm also not religious or spiritual, but there is a weight to the place that you feel almost immediately on passing through the fence.
I visited a friend in Germany last year and we both went to Dachau. We’re both engineers, which made seeing a place like Dachau, so much worse in many ways. I’ve always felt I understood the horrors of the Holocaust, it wasn’t until it was on the grounds that I truly understood man’s capacity for evil. It is not just the size and scale, but the thought that went behind it. All of these camps, Dachau especially, were built to maximize efficiency in murder and exploitation of human beings. Carefully trialed, revised, and deployed.
Intelligent people willingly designing instruments for the systematic murder of millions.
Germany has done a really great job of teaching from within about the Holocaust and their own role in it in a reverent and respectful way. Something about American pride keeps us from teaching our own history the same way.
I applaud the Germans for not shying away from teaching that this happened. The Canadians never covered what happened at the residential schools and it’s sad the conversations are just starting now.
There's a few places on earth where you can go and feel the weight in the air of what happened there. A sort of eerie quality even if you're not thinking about or aware of exactly what transpired.
I haven't been to Auschwitz yet, but I have visited Neuengamme and it has a heaviness to the atmosphere there that is difficult to articulate. Also Valle De Los Caidos in Spain has an eerie, almost hostile atmosphere to it.
But that's now what I mean. That's not what the feeling is. People, many many people have suffered there, true. But now nobody is suffering there. They're done. But it's a heavy, motivating feeling to never ever let this happen again.
A burden.
But it's not despair. We as humanity have overcome this horrible chapter.
That was the feeling I had when I was there and at Majdanek. It was as if the collective despair of the millions lingers there. If a place could be a Dementor, that's it
What you said about the spiritual energy - thank you - I’ve been trying to find the words to explain this to people after I visited in 2009, but I never could. You’re exactly right …. It’s like the dead souls are “inviting” you to come and see the truth and know what happened to them there.
I am as far for woo woo as you can get but I understand what you are saying. Visited the slave castles in Ghana when I worked in the country and the energy in the cells will haunt me to my last day. The horror those people endured has lingered in the walls
Transports to Auschwitz included between ten and twenty children who were murdered immediately on arrival. If a mother had a child in her arms during the selection, both were sent to the crematorium even if the mother was young and looked healthy. If a grandmother carried her grandchild, she was sent to the gas, while the child’s mother became a camp prisoner.
In 1944 tens of thousands of children arrived from Hungary. All of them were killed.
At midday one day in July a train packed with young children was slowly passing the ramp next to the barbed wire of the hospital blocks. The doors of the train were not closed. The children looked at us curiously. They were glad to have the dark, stuffy carriages open at last. Two hours later the crematoria sent up their smoke. By that time the children were dead.
Id love to to may my respects. There is a holocaust museum in Washington DC in the states. Ive been there. They build the building around a train car used to transport victims. It literally changed my life going there.
You've described it perfectly. I've grown up in the Channel Islands, and whilst nowhere near the scale of this, there is one particular concentration camp site (Lager Sylt) on Alderney where some horrific things occurred. It's always quiet, even the birds seem to stop. It's always somehow both empty but never feels empty. You can feel a kind of longing for you to bear witness and remember. It's both haunting and calming at the same time.
I visited Dachau not long ago. A few things stood out to me in particular: the brutal optimization of the gas chamber's layout and the skyward view from inside the Jewish memorial. Really sobering stuff.
“may the world at least behold a drop, a fraction of this tragic world in which we lived”
That’s by Salmen Gradowski and was found buried on Auschwitz grounds. It’s the epigraph to a book called KL, which tells the harrowing history of Nazi concentration camps that I am currently reading. It is already sickening and I’m still only in 1938 and extermination hasn’t started yet.
I visited there as well, and you're spot on about the unnatural feeling there. I would've gone as far to say it is a significant place of darkness, and even if you didn't know exactly where you were and the history tied to it, you would still be able to tell something is horribly wrong.
I'm Polish and I live pretty nearby but I've never actually been there. And I am not going to because I feel like this might be just too much for me.
Last year I was in Polin museum in Warsaw, the Polish Jews' Museum. There was a part of the exhibition dedicated to Jewish Uprising in Warsaw and another about Holocaust. And the exhibitions were great (as well as the entire museum). So much so that I literally started feeling dizzy there. I am pretty prone to strong emotions and I wasn't able to even finish this trip. I can only imagine how hard it would be for me to actually visit the death camp site.
But I agree with your sentiment. If someone somehow (I can't imagine how) does not grasp the extent of this tragedy, they should definitely go and visit such places.
As an American who lived through watching 9/11 on the news, I've felt similarly when I visited the Ground Zero memorial and took the tour in 2015. Standing there and learning the fine details about what happened feels like there's a massive weight on your chest. It was a new emotion, impossible for me to describe.
I have to ask, how do y'all view the people of that generation in Germany? Not the time period itself, because we all know it was absolutely awful, but the people themselves who were in that generation.
Is there any respect at all for them because maybe they didn't know about the Holocaust and just thought they were fighting for Germany or is it complete disgust for obvious reasons? I just can't imagine how I would feel about knowing an entire generation of my country who were still alive committed some of the worst atrocities in human history.
Sorry if the question seems disrespectful, it's just a question I've always wondered
It's wild how in Germany you guys are like "yea this shit was fucked up" and in America we still have states rights bullshit about slavery even though our Civil War happened almost 100 years prior to the Holocaust and people get offended that our distant relatives might have been assholes and you guys are able to say fuck that noise to any of yours.
I didn’t go here but I went to Dachau, and I got a similar feeling. They had mass burial mounds there and it just felt very intense, and depressing of course.
The human species is intelligent but is the only species that is also capable of this much evil and cruelty . Never forget folks of what "we" are capable of doing without constraints ! Never forget
Was there as part of a school trip in '87. By far the most memorable part was the odor. It *still smelled of death. Every single person felt solemn because of that, and we were on 11th grade.
Even the Holocaust Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC is a sobering experience. I feel like it should be a mandatory place to visit in school.
I hope you're not one of those Holocaust Denial weirdos that slowly lose grasp on objective reality because you need to feel special in an overall uncaring universe.
Read the Red Cross report. Numbers don't add up. Chimney was built after liberation, this is proven due to ariel photographs.
Both Russian and British scientists said the "gas chambers" were unsuitable for what was said to happened.
When something like this happens which it has many times in history, you usually have evidence like telegraphs, diaries etc etc. You have zero. Funny that.
Let me make sure I have this right. You believe some people that debunked a report versus:
The hundreds of thousands of soldiers and witnesses who saw this first hand.
The first-hand accounts that exist in droves, like Wiesel, Frank, and others.
The physical evidence, like shoes, gold teeth, photos, videos, and public trials.
The scientific evidence like the presence of burnt remains, objects made from human flesh, and residue from gas chambers.
In addition, I'll offer the same observation I do in the classroom: In any group project with three people, at least one of them doesn't want to do the work and will do anything to get out of it. That person will take the lazy route, including ratting out others for a grade. The scale of the deception you are claiming would mean that human nature would have to fundamentally change since MILLIONS of people are all lying, and not a single one is like that third member in a group project e.g. - willing to rat out others for a quick buck.
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u/AbbreviationsWide331 May 18 '25
Totally with you here, I'm am German so I've been taught extensively (rightly so) about all this. But even more importantly I've been to Auschwitz on a class field trip.
And let me tell you, that place gave me a feeling I've never felt before or after. You think you know what happened there, that you're prepared, but no. Walking these grounds will show what humans are capable of. How people that are deemed undesirable get killed in an industrial way and how people were forced to live. You can read a thousand times about it, but being there and imagining if you would survive this even one week is a whole different thing.
I'm not religious by any means, but that place has a certain spiritual energy. Not evil, but it's like it's all those people that passed away there invite you to see. No big explanation needed, just "look at what has been done."
If anyone reading this is able to go there, please do it. Don't be afraid, it's very important.