Where Aushwitz 1 looked eerily like a condemned college campus(it was previously a military fort). Birkenau, only a few miles down the road was surreal. It was incredibly big! It took me 20 minutes to walk across it without stopping. There were so many barracks, many destroyed, others rebuilt. The crematorium was destroyed but the ruins still there. The a holding station, known as Canada, was still there. There was another but it was destroyed along with one of the crematoriums, by sundercommandos, prisoners responsible to cremating and transporting the dead. Let us all learn from what remains!

Haunting.

Thanks for posting it. I know it's difficult for some of us to even open up this thread and look at the pictures. But if we don't look at pictures like these, we forget.

 

My mother was 15 years old when her father, a U.S. Army colonel, was assigned to the post-war occupation and reconstruction in late 1945. His whole family was sent to Germany. My mother visited one of the concentration camps which was still intact and still smelled bad. She said whenever she smells old rotting food, it reminds her of that place and makes her want to cry. She was so struck by what she saw that, after she walked away from the camp, she never teased anyone about their religion, race or ethnicity again. She gets mad when she hears other people get teased too.

What I said before.

 

The murals are chilling.

 

The ordered symmetry and organization belie the human chaos this place was built to manufacture.

The last one with the railroad makes me think this could be in the Midwest, with the flat countryside and treelines in the distance.