I was  not sure if i should post this album, it is only 1/20 of the pictures I took while visiting Auschwitz for 7 days. The pictures are of the main camp, I am only posting the exterior for people who have never been. I submit them because they were apart of my journey to five Concentration Camps in Central and Eastern Europe. So yes, i saw beautiful places but I also saw places that made me weep with great sorrow. I submit my pictures with respect to the Jewish Community, the Roma and Sinti, and all others who suffered at Auschwitz.

Wow...these are chilling given the history of the site.

Again, I highly recommend anyone visiting Poland to visit Auschwitz. I can't really describe the eerie feeling of death you get upon entering the campus. It's one thing to see it in a movie. It's another to walk down the streets and feel the ghosts. It's not something I really want to do again, though I'm glad I did.

 

I actually held it together pretty well until my parents and I were near this wall where they used to execute prisoners .. there were lots of bouquets of flowers, trinkets, etc along the ground to remember the dead .. and this one man came clutching a bouquet of flowers and just completely burst into tears. I mean, sobbing like a baby. I lost it.

Wow...these are chilling given the history of the site.

 

I'm a little taken back.  Powerful....just powerful.

I had a similar experience at Dachau outside of Munich. Some of that is reconstruction, isn't it?

Much more impactful than the black and white photos from the war.  Very chilling.  Hard to imagine some people really believe nothing happened there.

not as much reconstruction at auschwitz, more at birkenau 3 miles away.

A living graveyard.

take the bldgs completely out of context and the architecture seems a bit charming

 

 

Hi a

ll,

After all I have read and pictures that I have seen, I still get very sad and angry. May I add the Gays of the invaded countries who were also exterminated at these camps. Thank you for reminding all of us, again. Warm nuzzles and bear hugz.

 

Jim S.

 

 

 

some places are just outright haunting, like gettysburg. this has got to be one of those too.

 

Wow.. unbelievable..

 

Some of that is reconstruction, isn't it?

 

I was also going to say something along those lines, because some of those buildings are in impeccable shape.

 

Hi a

ll,

After all I have read and pictures that I have seen, I still get very sad and angry. May I add the Gays of the invaded countries who were also exterminated at these camps. Thank you for reminding all of us, again. Warm nuzzles and bear hugz.

 

Jim S.

 

Many of those who lived long enough to be liberated from the camps were placed immediately in German prisons because homosexuality was criminalized in Germany at the time. Thanks for the photos, Glenville - very powerful.

Thank you for posting these.  We need, individually and collectively, to remember.

 

Thanks Mayday, I had forgotten about that. Inspite of the Nazi atrocities they continued after the war had ended.  :x

Thanks for sharing. Powerful images.

Thanks for posting these pictures.  I toured Auschwitz in Nov 2006 with a friend who had lost many relatives there.  As horrible as it was for me, it was devistating for him. 

 

That Nazi Germany expended so much energy in the extermination of human beings is in itself a wonder.  The inhumanity exhibited is beyond what most people can imagine. A life changing experience indeed.

take the bldgs completely out of context and the architecture seems a bit charming

 

I was thinking how substantial the construction was.  Brick, stone, even tile roofs.

 

I say this thinking of WWII construction in the US, which was very lightweight wood frame. I always think of this US style of temporary building when seeing maps and diagrams of the KZs', but this wasn't how the Germans built them.  Built to last, so you wonder how long they planned on exterminating the Jews.  What would the do with them when they ran out of Jews?

 

 

There were lots of Poles, Russians, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, Catholic priests, and eventually I'd imagine anyone else who fell prey to their murderous regime.

Yes, there were atrocities committed on many different people, but please don't equate them to what happened to the Jewish people of Europe.  There is no comparison.

Thanks for visiting and photographing these places to share with us. It took me a few days to even work up the nerve to open the threads.

 

There's a powerful lesson in the stories from the camps. Some people still take people's innate wariness of whomever is different, nurture it into suspicion and fear, and then into hate, and then mobilize the hate to divide us one against the other and elevate themselves to great power.

 

Neo-Nazis exist in nearly every society; their danger is somewhat tempered by their often-obvious visibility and by their tendency toward inter-factional strife.

 

More dangerous are the outwardly respectable people who pervert democracy and the legal system to create and maintain repression against one group or another, and the preachers who invoke religion to focus the attention of unfulfilled and resentful people looking for someone to blame for their failures.

I agree Dan there is no comparison, but those are the folks that would have come next had we not stopped them. Russian POWs were probably second only to Jews in terms of the horridness of their treatment.

Come to think of it, if I recal right, the extermination function was secondary in Auschwitz as it was intended as a forced labor camp.  There were other camps deeper in Poland whos sole purpose was extermination.

 

This might account for the more substantial construction here.  After the Germans exterminated whoever they were going to exterminate they would use it for slave labor.

 

Russian POWs were probably second only to Jews in terms of the horridness of their treatment.

 

This is true, and its not because they were Communist.  The Germans considered the Slavs (not just the Russians) sort of inferior, they way we white Americans looked at the Indians or Blacks.

 

 

 

 

I agree Dan there is no comparison, but those are the folks that would have come next had we not stopped them. Russian POWs were probably second only to Jews in terms of the horridness of their treatment.

 

And I believe the Russians reciprocated in their treatment of German POWs. A former German soldier who once worked with my brother had been captured by the Russians and held in a POW camp, and told of extreme gratuitous brutality. He and another man managed to kill two Russian guards one night and escape.

The Eastern Front was perhaps one of the prime example of civilization literally ceasing to exist.

A few points, the Germans occupied Auschwitz because it had a former training facility, this facility was build upon, if you look closely, most of the building were single floor structures, the Germans build second stories onto most. In Birkenau, you see the quickly completed barracks with wood frames.

The Germans actually didn't have to do a lot of the slaughtering in the East. In Eastern towns you often had local volunteers who would entertain the Germans with their own hatred. A lot of people think this is the first time the Jews were banished and tormented in Europe. Germany actually had very few Jews, only 500,000 or so. The German Jews were very assimilated and "German" in culture.  In the east, you had more conservative Jews and they were for several hundred years continuously invited and banished from host countries. Old-wives tales and myth often fueled the hatred. Also Christians would banish Jews when they no longer had the ability to pay back debt. Since Christians were not allowed to loan money,  Jews became often the only suppliers of credit.The Russians alone will one day deal with their own killing machine, which frighteningly might double the number massacred by the Germans. The Germans were only successful for one reason, that was technology. The others who had driven the Jews out didn't have that important component at their disposal.  Excuse the typos