What happened in Auschwitz and place like that defies comprehension. How could the Nazis live with themselves? As the Jewish people say, we must never forget.
Because they are an important reminder of what happened. If it were knocked down, no doubt certain social networks would be full of people insisting that it never happened. I’ve been there, done the full tour of the Auschwitz 1 site, the former Polish army barracks which is grim and requires a strong stomach (most people find one specific thing that breaks them. For me it was the shoes) but it’s not the site of the industrial slaughter. It’s the one with the familiar ARBEIT MACHT FREI archway.
(These are my photos by the way. I’m afraid they are low-quality scans from black-and-white negatives but only black-and-white would do, I felt)
I was one of the 30% of visitors who moved on to Birkenau (Brzezinka, it means “place with birch trees” in both German and Polish). That’s the one with the guard house over those terrible railway tracks.
It’s not hard to imagine people (and corpses) being dragged from the cattle trucks with dogs barking and snarling at them. Quite a lot of Birkenau (Auschwitz 2) has been demolished, leaving just one row of huts (standard issue Wehrmacht horse barracks each providing stabling for 16 horses or 1,000 Untermensch, with a line of “latrines” down the middle
So you can imaging people with dysentery climbing over each other to get to the “latrines” before it’s too late.
Where the rest of the huts were is a big grassy field. At the other end of the railway track you can go through the processing centre including the “hairdresser” where new arrivals had their hair ripped off with rusty sheep shears, culminating in the “showers” where those not picked out for slave labour were “deloused” with Zyklon B. You can even see the ovens at the far end, and outside you can see the pond, still grey with suspended ash dumped there.
Now, Andy Carroll, I’ve looked at your profile and I think your question is sincere but do you really think those dreadful things should be swept away, so that the world can sleep peacefully in its bed? Because we are still living with the consequences of those things, and to pretend they never happened will help nobody.
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