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Has anyone visited Auschwitz?

Ethros

Ethros

Vice Admiral
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So a few friends and I are taking a trip (from England) to Krakow, Poland in a few days. I know a few us are interested in visiting Auschwitz. I can imagine it's a very sombre and horrible place but while we're nearby I think we'd like to see it and pay our respects.

Just wondering if anyone here has been, how was your experience and any tips or advice etc? Is there a special bus or whatnot you have to get to go there?

And yeah I know I can google a lot of this stuff but I do like to ask real people and the folk on here, see what you have to say.

Many thanks
 
I've been to Dachau. Eerie and sobering. The thing I remember is that there were no bird sounds in the camp.
 
I've been to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Be aware that it is actually three separate camps and they are some distance apart from one another. Auschwitz I was originally a Polish Army base that was converted to a labor camp. It's actually rather pretty looking, as it wasn't designed as a concentration camp. Auschwitz II (Birkenau) is the one made infamous by its use as a pure death camp. Both are very much worth visiting. Auschwitz III has been largely demolished, for better or for worse.

I really think that visiting a concentration camp is something every person should experience once in their lifetime if they are able. It's really hard to comprehend the Holocaust outside of purely academic pursuits until you are face to face with a pile of prosthetic limbs that were confiscated from prisoners before they were led into gas chambers.

It's been a few years since I visited, but I do remember there being an ice cream vendor who had set up shop just outside the gates to the Auschwitz I museum. He was definitely a help in getting through that day.
 
I wouldn't want to. The Holocaust Museum in Washington is bad enough (I went in high school), and the mass killing scenes in the 1988 mini-series "War and Remembrance" (filmed at Auschwitz) are 10 times worse than what Spielberg showed in "Schindler's List." I'm honestly surprised that made it onto network TV back then.

Just seeing that is deeply disturbing. Sobering and edifying, but I wanted to be alone for awhile after it....and that was just a TV movie. Actually going to the place would be too much for me to handle, I expect.

May humanity take the lessons of the past and never repeat such atrocities ever again.
 
I've known a few people who have been and someone I studied Broadcast Journalism with did a documentary on it for their final year dissertation.

As for myself visiting it, then yes, it is a place I would be willing to go due to the shear history behind it and the fact it was relatively easy for a place like that to exist when you dehumanise entire groups of people.
 
Ethros said:
So a few friends and I are taking a trip (from England) to Krakow, Poland in a few days. I know a few us are interested in visiting Auschwitz. I can imagine it's a very sombre and horrible place but while we're nearby I think we'd like to see it and pay our respects.

Just wondering if anyone here has been, how was your experience and any tips or advice etc? Is there a special bus or whatnot you have to get to go there?

And yeah I know I can google a lot of this stuff but I do like to ask real people and the folk on here, see what you have to say.

Many thanks
Click to expand...


Yes, I went, from Krakow about two years ago. I expected it to be powerful, but I was bowled over by just how powerful. It is one of the most memorable places I have ever been.

We used a small tour company that takes you to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the morning and the salt mines in the afternoon, in a group of about 6. It's run by an English couple who emigrated to Krakow, and it was really good. Sets out early in the morning so you see Auschwitz II in basically total silence, with no other tourists, and you're allowed free reign to explore the site yourself which is better, in my opinion, than being shepherded around by someone waving an umbrella. Annoyingly I can't for the life of me find the name of the company. I will ask mrs. cultcross later.

I was initially sceptical about only spending a morning there but it's enough. There's only so much you can take. And the salt mines are nice counterpoint for the afternoon. They have an underground salt cathedral, it's amazing in itself, and the tour group behind us were an Italian choir. They sang 'O Holy Night' in the cathedral, and it was so beautiful after what we'd seen that morning that I wept. I still get emotional thinking about it now, and this is from someone who deals with nasty shit on a regular basis.

If you haven't already seen it, I advise watching the BBC series Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution which is a really good history of the camp and will help you make sense of what is left behind. It's on Netflix.

In short, something I'd recommend anyone does. I'll be taking any future children I have, I think it's important that people see it, and appreciate exactly where hatred leads.
 
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Thanks a lot guys, really appreciate it :techman: Flying over very early Thursday morning so thinking maybe Friday or Saturday (as it's only a 3 night trip), but thanks again and I'll let you know how we got on
 
When I went to Israel, I visited Yad Vashem (the Holocaust history museum) in Jerusalem..one of the things you see are thousands of shoes under glass panels, personal effects of victims and survivors, history exhibits (including the futile uprisings against the Nazis) and most telling, the hall of names..2 million personal stories of survival and loss stored in one building (designed to hold 6 million, the Israelis are currently researching and transcribing as many stories as possible before the records deteriorate beyond use).. very sobering..at the end, you exit to a panorama of the Israeli countryside, after such a sobering experience, you need to have the peace of the natural world to help you back to normal and the architect understood that..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yad_Vashem
http://www.yadvashem.org/museum/holocaust-history-museum
http://www.yadvashem.org/museum/holocaust-history-museum/hall-of-names
 
sttngfan1701d said:
I wouldn't want to. The Holocaust Museum in Washington is bad enough (I went in high school), and the mass killing scenes in the 1988 mini-series "War and Remembrance" (filmed at Auschwitz) are 10 times worse than what Spielberg showed in "Schindler's List." I'm honestly surprised that made it onto network TV back then.

Just seeing that is deeply disturbing. Sobering and edifying, but I wanted to be alone for awhile after it....and that was just a TV movie. Actually going to the place would be too much for me to handle, I expect.

May humanity take the lessons of the past and never repeat such atrocities ever again.
Click to expand...
I saw "War and Remembrance" a few months ago. They got permission to show what they showed. And yeah, it's harder than Schindler's List.
 
It was the memorial to the children that really stuck in my head in Yad Vashem. A candle flame multiplied by mirrors thousands of times all around you creating a night sky while the names and ages of all the children who died are read out. Although I found Yad Vashem as a whole a little disquieting for different reasons (mostly because I shared the experience with bus loads of, well basically children, in military uniform and carrying automatic weapons who seemed not to appreciate any irony in the situation at all) that part, and the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations were quite something.
 
I went roughly 4 years ago, during the winter.

One of the most powerful and profound moments I have ever experienced was standing near one of the exposed mass graves at Birkenau, freezing cold, snow settling on me, when from behind I heard the sound of singing. I turned, facing the large Memorial, where I saw a group of 50 Hasidic Jews standing in a semi-circle. They sang for perhaps 25 minutes, as the snow fell heavier, coating them, the sun disappearing behind the forest and the candles they had lit coming to the fore.

I found myself watching them, in tears, as their melancholy voices, their passion, their pain, just sunk into me.

If I were a religious man I would say that was the most spiritual moment I have experienced in my life. Regardless, it was one of the most singularly beautiful things I have ever been privileged to witness and I am ever grateful to have been present.

I visited as part of an afternoon excursion covering both Auschwitz and Birkenau. I was fortunate to have our guide cancel on us due to sickness, so a director of the museum ended up guiding us. All of the elders of his family died at the camp, so he had a personal history to relate, adding a vital depth to the history he was retelling.

Auschwitz is a remarkable place (and Museum), almost exactly what I envisioned. Birkenau I was NOT prepared for. Perhaps it was because I went in the winter, but the realities and horrors of the period slammed home when you walk through the dilapidated barracks that the prisoners were forced to live and die in. The sheer scope of the horror doesn't just sink in, it seems to etch itself onto your soul.

Whilst you are in Krakow, on a more beautiful note, at they do evening classical music performances, typically allowing students and graduates of the Krakow Academy of Music to practise/perform. When I attended it was a string quartet and two woodwinds, who were of an exceptional standard. Tickets were around the 15 Euro mark, but worth every penny given the quality of performance and the venue (the acoustics were amazing in that church). I found it to be a beautiful way to spend 90 minutes before finding a cosy little bar to sample the local dumplings and honeyed beer (Pinty)

Hugo - one of his favourite cities
 
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MANT! said:
When I went to Israel, I visited Yad Vashem (the Holocaust history museum) in Jerusalem..one of the things you see are thousands of shoes under glass panels, personal effects of victims and survivors, history exhibits (including the futile uprisings against the Nazis) and most telling, the hall of names..2 million personal stories of survival and loss stored in one building (designed to hold 6 million, the Israelis are currently researching and transcribing as many stories as possible before the records deteriorate beyond use).. very sobering..at the end, you exit to a panorama of the Israeli countryside, after such a sobering experience, you need to have the peace of the natural world to help you back to normal and the architect understood that..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yad_Vashem
http://www.yadvashem.org/museum/holocaust-history-museum
http://www.yadvashem.org/museum/holocaust-history-museum/hall-of-names
Click to expand...
Will be there in July.
 
My brother went, he said that you could almost feel the evil there. The museum really seemed to get to him.
 
sttngfan1701d said:
I wouldn't want to. The Holocaust Museum in Washington is bad enough (I went in high school), and the mass killing scenes in the 1988 mini-series "War and Remembrance" (filmed at Auschwitz) are 10 times worse than what Spielberg showed in "Schindler's List." I'm honestly surprised that made it onto network TV back then.

Just seeing that is deeply disturbing. Sobering and edifying, but I wanted to be alone for awhile after it....and that was just a TV movie. Actually going to the place would be too much for me to handle, I expect.

May humanity take the lessons of the past and never repeat such atrocities ever again.
Click to expand...
my late father was a Holocaust survivor, I don't think I could go to a concentration camp, but I have been to the Holocaust museum in DC and like you said it was very sobering. I also went to the register office there to find out if they had any info on my father. He was a displaced person after the war. At first the man couldn't find anything and I was slowly walking away when he came after me and found some papers about my father. I was thrilled, it made me feel like I still had contact with my father. He was not in a concentration camp, but he did spend time in Russia in one of their prisons, which wasn't any picnic.
 
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