Majdanek Concentration Camp
Posted by: u5227470736789439 on 13 November 2006
Dear Friends,
On the Second of November I visited this horrible place as a sort pilgrimage during my stay in Poland with Frank F, to make clear in my mind not the nature of the evil, but the scale of it, which can happen when a nation, a culture, a religion - what ever classification one finds suitable to put upon it - reverts to Medieval Tyrany, and the dehumanisation of other human beings, generally by methods terror and propoganda.
I shall attampt to write something later, at greater length, on the experience and the thoughts provoked, but I have been fighting shy of this, for it is not so easy a subject, lightly, to apply words to.
Therefore I please ask that this does not become a thread where political points are made, but rather that others may feel that they themselves would like - perhaps just once - to consider such a visit if such has not already been made. From what I shall write later you may find it too terrifying or actually a matter of conscience as to whether you proceed with such a visit. Or even just ponder the whole issue, as sentient human beings aware of the evils of the world's human polpulations in periods of politcal mayhem.
Kindest regards from Fredrik
On the Second of November I visited this horrible place as a sort pilgrimage during my stay in Poland with Frank F, to make clear in my mind not the nature of the evil, but the scale of it, which can happen when a nation, a culture, a religion - what ever classification one finds suitable to put upon it - reverts to Medieval Tyrany, and the dehumanisation of other human beings, generally by methods terror and propoganda.
I shall attampt to write something later, at greater length, on the experience and the thoughts provoked, but I have been fighting shy of this, for it is not so easy a subject, lightly, to apply words to.
Therefore I please ask that this does not become a thread where political points are made, but rather that others may feel that they themselves would like - perhaps just once - to consider such a visit if such has not already been made. From what I shall write later you may find it too terrifying or actually a matter of conscience as to whether you proceed with such a visit. Or even just ponder the whole issue, as sentient human beings aware of the evils of the world's human polpulations in periods of politcal mayhem.
Kindest regards from Fredrik
Posted on: 13 November 2006 by andy c
Not anywhwhere near as emotional (perhaps), but I've seen the new monument to the jews near the Brandenburgh Gate twice now, and all I can say i I feel very humbled indeed by it all...
I feel a compelling need to visit just such a place as you have, Fredrik, to try and get some perspective in my own mind....
I feel a compelling need to visit just such a place as you have, Fredrik, to try and get some perspective in my own mind....
Posted on: 13 November 2006 by acad tsunami
Well done Fredrick,
I think everyone would benefit from a visit to these concentration camps and that they would do well to make the strong determination never to allow such things to happen again.
Many people know 6 million jews died in the camps but how many know that 6 million Poles died too?
Let us remember these Jews and Poles and Hungarians and Gypsies, mentally and physcially handipcapped and homosexuals - the list is shockingly long - and make a personal determination never to let such things ever happen again.
I think everyone would benefit from a visit to these concentration camps and that they would do well to make the strong determination never to allow such things to happen again.
Many people know 6 million jews died in the camps but how many know that 6 million Poles died too?
Let us remember these Jews and Poles and Hungarians and Gypsies, mentally and physcially handipcapped and homosexuals - the list is shockingly long - and make a personal determination never to let such things ever happen again.
Posted on: 13 November 2006 by BigH47
After our visit last year to Auschwitz I found the organisation and logic of the exterminations is what really hit home. As unbelievable as the concept was,that organisation to make it happen was truely frightening.
Howard
Howard
Posted on: 13 November 2006 by Big Brother
Dear All
Funny thing is I learned about the Nazi's from my dad, who fought in Europe during WW II and helped liberate Auschwitz, as an American GI.
His younger brother, my uncle Robert, was killed in action about a mile and a half from where he was camped.
As a kid I remember asking my pop if there was anything that was worse than death. "Yes", he said "being captured by the Nazis, tortured, worked to death and then killed."
I only remember that one comment about the Nazi's, as he never talked about the war.
Nowadays Germany likes to pride itself as being the leader or a model of civilization.
I suppose, if something like the Holocaust ever happens again, it will be under different enough circumstances that we will not see the similarity. We always seem to forget.
Regards
BB
Funny thing is I learned about the Nazi's from my dad, who fought in Europe during WW II and helped liberate Auschwitz, as an American GI.
His younger brother, my uncle Robert, was killed in action about a mile and a half from where he was camped.
As a kid I remember asking my pop if there was anything that was worse than death. "Yes", he said "being captured by the Nazis, tortured, worked to death and then killed."
I only remember that one comment about the Nazi's, as he never talked about the war.
Nowadays Germany likes to pride itself as being the leader or a model of civilization.
I suppose, if something like the Holocaust ever happens again, it will be under different enough circumstances that we will not see the similarity. We always seem to forget.
Regards
BB
Posted on: 13 November 2006 by Mick P
Chaps
I few years ago I visited Istanbul on holiday and on the way back we stumbled across Gallapoli.
It is just a massive plot of land with thousands upon thousands of stone markers for each Turkish and Commonwealth soldier who died there.
The average age was just 16, yes 16. Young boys literally put to slaughter. They never hated each other, they just went in and got shot to pieces.
Mrs Mick and I must have spent 3 hours wandering around just staring and wondering how this could ever happen.
Mrs Mick and I usually never stop talking to each other but this was one occassion when neither of us hardly uttered a word for over 3 hours, such was the scale and horror.
Everyone should visit something like this at least once in their life but it does leave you scarred.
Regards
Mick
I few years ago I visited Istanbul on holiday and on the way back we stumbled across Gallapoli.
It is just a massive plot of land with thousands upon thousands of stone markers for each Turkish and Commonwealth soldier who died there.
The average age was just 16, yes 16. Young boys literally put to slaughter. They never hated each other, they just went in and got shot to pieces.
Mrs Mick and I must have spent 3 hours wandering around just staring and wondering how this could ever happen.
Mrs Mick and I usually never stop talking to each other but this was one occassion when neither of us hardly uttered a word for over 3 hours, such was the scale and horror.
Everyone should visit something like this at least once in their life but it does leave you scarred.
Regards
Mick
Posted on: 13 November 2006 by u5227470736789439
A Day Out In Lublin
Frank and I set out on the train to Lublin from Warsaw in the very first snows of winter. It was bitterly cold, and the train quite slow, but the mood was jolly and the conversation good.
At the station we took a taxi to the Camp, which is actually very close to the edge of the town.
The snow was blowing horizontally and stung against the face in a very fierce wind, and that set the scene for a long walk round the almost deserted remains of the second biggest Nazi Concentration Camp. This is a place, preserved in part but not in any way beautified. The wooden huts stood black against the autumnal, almost khaki coloured grass, slate grey sky, and the whitish horizon. The great monolithic monuments raised to mark the place were also seen in a monochrome fashion partly unfocussed in the airborn snow.
To walk among these huts, barbed wired fences and watch towers, and to look inside some of them containing artefacts such as the countless shoes and other remains came immediately after a silent and thoughtful walk into and back out of the gas chambers at the lowest part of the camp, most adjacent to Lublin itself. I could walk out.
Then to feel the crunch of the rubble roadway under the feet and the roughness of the stone, brick, and mortar of its rough but level surface was to be both removed from, but acutely aware of the profound aura of sadness and calamity which covers this place. But there was still a long was to go - several miles in fact.
Then into one of the prisoner compounds, through primitive wooden gates cover in more barbed wire, in fences that in this most central part were electrified. By now the path was made of bricks laid neatly, between huts that were simply one wooden board thick, apart from the crude timber frames that supported them. No ventilation, no insulation. Suddenly it dawned on me that even in a very good coat and strong trousers and pullover; I was frozen to the bone. How did the unfortunate inmates cope with rages clothes, and often not allowed to wear adequate foot ware. The aim was clearly to drag them down before starvation, disease or loosing the will to live finished them off. Some off course never made it to the accommodation, being sent directly into the gas chambers.
Of the accommodation one Field [or Pole in Polish], containing I think twenty four sleeping huts have been preserved intact, out of the six [by twenty-four] originally constructed. To convey the area cover both in hut and the rudimentary foundations, elsewhere, is very difficult unless like me you grew up in the countryside on a farm where 25 acres means something. Well twenty-five acres is a fairly normal sized field on a farm in Herefordshire. The camp extended to 516 Hectares, which is 1290 acres or about fifty good-sized English farm fields.
You soon realise from this that the walk was going to take a rather long time. All this area containing suffering for years on an unprecedented scale. How could such a phenomenon have come about? Well I cannot possibly write a brief history of it here, but each stage of the deepening of the depravity seems to have depended firstly on creating a problem, and then solving it in an even more evil way than the original plan had in mind. It is here that I hope some of you may investigate the subject of the history for yourselves, because I was indeed shocked and surprised at the inadequacy of the history of this as taught in the UK, because the terror in this and other camps (of the various sorts) was levelled at primarily the Jewish, who did not constitute an overall majority of the those murdered in these camps overall, but somewhat less than half the victims. The second most numerous group was Polish. Not anti-Nazi by definition, but merely anyone who might pose a threat to the Nazi propaganda machine so University Dons were murdered beside Catholic Priest, beside Left-winger, beside... After that proportionally came other group characterised as dangerous and degenerate. Then the Soviets took over and continued the narbarity after ousting the Nazis... This time the victims were Poles who had been opposing the Nazis...
To ponder this as one walked, frozen cold in driving snow through such a desolate place had hardly prepared me for the stopping point. The Crematorium. Part of what is aptly described as the "Machinery Of Mass Murder."
I was ready to not go in, but did for all that - but not for long. I cannot actually find words for this, but I found my way out of a modern fire exit at the back, the ground reeling under my feet, groping the wall. Across from the hellish place was a little hut which I managed to reach, but unfortunately crashed into with some force. It was a Police watch hut, and the thud must have alerted the Officer inside. He came round to me, but graciously turned round and left me to my convulsions... I stayed there a rather long time...
...
It may have been perhaps two miles back the main entrance, and I was still reeling. The ground was terrifyingly unsure under my feet. I was frozen cold, wet in parts...
So why do I think I should post this? Because I conclude that all of should occasionally should think about this, and think of our democratic responsibilities, and speak up when our own government seems to about to do wrong things. We must in my view vote with a weather eye on what history has to tell us about the consequences of electing what becomes Totalitarian Government. It starts incrementally. The propaganda is already in place... We must think. We owe it to those who fought this appalling evil and those perished as a result of it to consider not just our thoughts, but to be careful of our future actions. The absence of action is what allows eveil to survive...
I hope we can avoid finger pointing at this time, but the evils found in this place continue, and the continue in our democratic societies where the freedoms fought for at that time are gradually eroded by governments who often seem to pay little more than lip service to the ideals of freedom, respect, humanity, humility, and democracy in the name of protecting us from those people our leaders choose to demonise in our names. And also the words and actions of some who would see it all happen angain. I have no adequate words to to describe my feelings about this...
The trip home was rather long and quiet.
Thanks for reading this, and maybe, just maybe, it may help a comprehension of such a sad place, and a profoundly demoralising part of our history.
Fredrik
Frank and I set out on the train to Lublin from Warsaw in the very first snows of winter. It was bitterly cold, and the train quite slow, but the mood was jolly and the conversation good.
At the station we took a taxi to the Camp, which is actually very close to the edge of the town.
The snow was blowing horizontally and stung against the face in a very fierce wind, and that set the scene for a long walk round the almost deserted remains of the second biggest Nazi Concentration Camp. This is a place, preserved in part but not in any way beautified. The wooden huts stood black against the autumnal, almost khaki coloured grass, slate grey sky, and the whitish horizon. The great monolithic monuments raised to mark the place were also seen in a monochrome fashion partly unfocussed in the airborn snow.
To walk among these huts, barbed wired fences and watch towers, and to look inside some of them containing artefacts such as the countless shoes and other remains came immediately after a silent and thoughtful walk into and back out of the gas chambers at the lowest part of the camp, most adjacent to Lublin itself. I could walk out.
Then to feel the crunch of the rubble roadway under the feet and the roughness of the stone, brick, and mortar of its rough but level surface was to be both removed from, but acutely aware of the profound aura of sadness and calamity which covers this place. But there was still a long was to go - several miles in fact.
Then into one of the prisoner compounds, through primitive wooden gates cover in more barbed wire, in fences that in this most central part were electrified. By now the path was made of bricks laid neatly, between huts that were simply one wooden board thick, apart from the crude timber frames that supported them. No ventilation, no insulation. Suddenly it dawned on me that even in a very good coat and strong trousers and pullover; I was frozen to the bone. How did the unfortunate inmates cope with rages clothes, and often not allowed to wear adequate foot ware. The aim was clearly to drag them down before starvation, disease or loosing the will to live finished them off. Some off course never made it to the accommodation, being sent directly into the gas chambers.
Of the accommodation one Field [or Pole in Polish], containing I think twenty four sleeping huts have been preserved intact, out of the six [by twenty-four] originally constructed. To convey the area cover both in hut and the rudimentary foundations, elsewhere, is very difficult unless like me you grew up in the countryside on a farm where 25 acres means something. Well twenty-five acres is a fairly normal sized field on a farm in Herefordshire. The camp extended to 516 Hectares, which is 1290 acres or about fifty good-sized English farm fields.
You soon realise from this that the walk was going to take a rather long time. All this area containing suffering for years on an unprecedented scale. How could such a phenomenon have come about? Well I cannot possibly write a brief history of it here, but each stage of the deepening of the depravity seems to have depended firstly on creating a problem, and then solving it in an even more evil way than the original plan had in mind. It is here that I hope some of you may investigate the subject of the history for yourselves, because I was indeed shocked and surprised at the inadequacy of the history of this as taught in the UK, because the terror in this and other camps (of the various sorts) was levelled at primarily the Jewish, who did not constitute an overall majority of the those murdered in these camps overall, but somewhat less than half the victims. The second most numerous group was Polish. Not anti-Nazi by definition, but merely anyone who might pose a threat to the Nazi propaganda machine so University Dons were murdered beside Catholic Priest, beside Left-winger, beside... After that proportionally came other group characterised as dangerous and degenerate. Then the Soviets took over and continued the narbarity after ousting the Nazis... This time the victims were Poles who had been opposing the Nazis...
To ponder this as one walked, frozen cold in driving snow through such a desolate place had hardly prepared me for the stopping point. The Crematorium. Part of what is aptly described as the "Machinery Of Mass Murder."
I was ready to not go in, but did for all that - but not for long. I cannot actually find words for this, but I found my way out of a modern fire exit at the back, the ground reeling under my feet, groping the wall. Across from the hellish place was a little hut which I managed to reach, but unfortunately crashed into with some force. It was a Police watch hut, and the thud must have alerted the Officer inside. He came round to me, but graciously turned round and left me to my convulsions... I stayed there a rather long time...
...
It may have been perhaps two miles back the main entrance, and I was still reeling. The ground was terrifyingly unsure under my feet. I was frozen cold, wet in parts...
So why do I think I should post this? Because I conclude that all of should occasionally should think about this, and think of our democratic responsibilities, and speak up when our own government seems to about to do wrong things. We must in my view vote with a weather eye on what history has to tell us about the consequences of electing what becomes Totalitarian Government. It starts incrementally. The propaganda is already in place... We must think. We owe it to those who fought this appalling evil and those perished as a result of it to consider not just our thoughts, but to be careful of our future actions. The absence of action is what allows eveil to survive...
I hope we can avoid finger pointing at this time, but the evils found in this place continue, and the continue in our democratic societies where the freedoms fought for at that time are gradually eroded by governments who often seem to pay little more than lip service to the ideals of freedom, respect, humanity, humility, and democracy in the name of protecting us from those people our leaders choose to demonise in our names. And also the words and actions of some who would see it all happen angain. I have no adequate words to to describe my feelings about this...
The trip home was rather long and quiet.
Thanks for reading this, and maybe, just maybe, it may help a comprehension of such a sad place, and a profoundly demoralising part of our history.
Fredrik
Posted on: 13 November 2006 by u5227470736789439
I have to aplogise. I can't correct the mistakes just now. Fredrik
Posted on: 13 November 2006 by Ian G.
I too had a harrowing time visiting Dachau as a happy-go-lucky young interrailer in my student days. An experience which has never left me and had a profound (positive) influnce on my growing up. As many here have mentioned such a visit should be undertaken by everyone at least once - for me, frankly, once was enough.
Ian
Ian
Posted on: 14 November 2006 by Michael_B.
I can understand both your feelings and thoughts on this Fredrick.
The heaps of shoes, glasses and dentures, the skin lampshades and soap...
Have you heard of Terezin and the music composed there between 41 and 44?
There are so many sides to what is human...
Mike
The heaps of shoes, glasses and dentures, the skin lampshades and soap...
Have you heard of Terezin and the music composed there between 41 and 44?
There are so many sides to what is human...
Mike
Posted on: 14 November 2006 by Beano
Fredrik,
I appreciate your willingness to put into words was all that was necessary. You took me there!
Thank you,
Paul
I appreciate your willingness to put into words was all that was necessary. You took me there!
Thank you,
Paul
Posted on: 14 November 2006 by Chillkram
Fredrik
Thank you.
Mark
Thank you.
Mark
Posted on: 14 November 2006 by northpole
Fredrik
There is a series on tv at the moment about the Holocaust. Whilst tv can't begin to convey the smells, textures, climate, etc. of an actual visit to a place such as Lublin, the phrase which stuck with me from the programmes I saw was how the Nazi's had perfected the industrialised process of killing people. Every trace of humanity was extinguished from that regime of evil.
Your words help to convey, but I still can't quite envisage the magnitude of horrific sensations generated by such a visit. I did not appreciate the physical scale of Lublin.
Not one single aspect of it should be allowed to be forgotten. Equally, a balance is needed to avoid becoming dragged down and taken over by it. Easier said than done I'm sure.
Peter
There is a series on tv at the moment about the Holocaust. Whilst tv can't begin to convey the smells, textures, climate, etc. of an actual visit to a place such as Lublin, the phrase which stuck with me from the programmes I saw was how the Nazi's had perfected the industrialised process of killing people. Every trace of humanity was extinguished from that regime of evil.
Your words help to convey, but I still can't quite envisage the magnitude of horrific sensations generated by such a visit. I did not appreciate the physical scale of Lublin.
Not one single aspect of it should be allowed to be forgotten. Equally, a balance is needed to avoid becoming dragged down and taken over by it. Easier said than done I'm sure.
Peter
Posted on: 15 November 2006 by Rasher
quote:Originally posted by Fredrik_Fiske:
I hope we can avoid finger pointing at this time, but the evils found in this place continue, and the continue in our democratic societies where the freedoms fought for at that time are gradually eroded by governments who often seem to pay little more than lip service to the ideals of freedom, respect, humanity, humility, and democracy in the name of protecting us from those people our leaders choose to demonise in our names. And also the words and actions of some who would see it all happen again.
Exactly. We need to think long and hard about the parallels with our current situation.
I visited here about ten years ago and don't believe anyone can come away the same person, and I don't think I could ever attempt to descibe what I still feel. We must never forget.