Liberation of Auschwitz 70 years ago
 

Quoting from a little book by Sybille Steinbacher purchased 2005 at Auschwitz (on my birthday): "On the afternoon of 27 January 1945 soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukranian Front liberated Auschwitz. They found at least 600 corpses. In the parent camp, in Birkenau and in Monowitz some 7,000 prisoners were still alive, about 5,800 of them in Birkenau, about 800 in the prisoner's infirmary building in Monowitz, and 500 in the small sub camps. Many were already so weak that they were barely aware of the event they had so long yearned for.

In the warehouses the liberators found about 370,000 men's suits and 837,000 women's coats and dresses, huge amounts of children's clothing, about 44,000 pairs of shoes...7.7 tons of human hair packed ready for transport..."

End to a terrible period

On another posting there have been many remarks about the Auschwitz death camp. A couple of added notes. When we visited there on my birthday a survivor then in charge of the museum hosted us and explained that he was spared because he was a translator. It is important to realize that there were many other internment camps where executions took place. Or starvation and death from disease. Looking down the railroad track at Birkenau barracks (added facility built adjacent to Auschwitz itself due to demand) I thought of trainloads of Jews arriving from Hungary e.g. who never realized that they would be immediately exterminated.

A close friend recently deceased was imprisoned along with his father at Theresienstadt. Their delayed internment was only because the mother was Lutheran. His father said when Poland was partitioned, "Now he knows where to put the Jews." He lived in Frankfurt and his Jewish school was closed after the Nazi occupation and he wore a star.

"I worked in the barracks until May 8, 1945, VE Day, the day when the Russians came down the highway outside the camp and liberated us. I must say that if it wasn't for the Russians I wouldn't be here today. Their doctors and nurses took care of us because typhus broke out."

By the way, this friend who spoke no English arrived in America with his parents, got a BS degree at NY University at Oswego, MA degree at Syracuse U, PhD at Univ. of Missouri, served in Korea in 1954. And then taught journalism at Kent State and in south Texas and retired in Springfield, MO, a block from where I lived.

I honor the memory of Harvey Saalberg.

I remember laying flowers at the multilingual memorials at Birkenau, at the end of the railway sidings near to destroyed crematoria. Stood there in silent contemplation of innocent lives cruelly taken away, and prayed for their souls.

We went to Auschwitz when we were in Krakow, a couple of years ago. Although as an older visitor it really hit home to me, I wondered if the schoolchildren who were there on that day understood where they were and what they were seeing.

I wonder if it becomes in their minds, like a theme park instead of a place of unspeakable horror. As the generation who were tortured there die, how do we preserve the message that should go out, especially in view of the rise of anti-semitism at the moment.

While I agree with your overall point about teaching children about the Shoah and "Holocaust tourism", what is being perceived and mislabled as a rise in anti-semitism at the moment is not the same as the anti-semitism that sent milliions of people into concentrations camps in Europe to be industrially murdered. WIthout understanding the difference between the "Final Solution," and its intellectual origins in Christianity and scientific racism, vs the angry assignment of collective guilt and blaming Judaism and all Jews for the actions of a few in Israel, that is not only a wrong messaged to send but it risks creating a new wave of group killing all its own, this time directed at both Muslims and others who have nothing to do with anti-semitism.

I recall someone on Fodors saying that while traveling to Poland and Krakow they would not visit Auschwitz, just too grim. My response was that everyone should visit Auschwitz if possible or another such death camp. Many years ago I read Wm. L. Shirer's book "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." I read it scarcely believing what I read...and yet I was a teen ager during WWII so remember vividly that global conflict. But to learn the extent of the Nazi massacres...I still can't believe it. Well, I do believe it of course and do realize this wasn't and isn't the only extermination program. Just pick up today's newspaper.

I doubt I would ever go to Auschwitz or any death camp (and my chances of getting my Jewish husband to go there are next to non-existent).

There is a persistent belief among some people that unless people go to Auschwitz or another death camp, that no one grasps the extent of the horror. I disagree. Not only that, having read several books like The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg, I have no trouble believing that a government did that -- and that a future government could do it again, if not necessarily to Jews, but no one is really safe from that if people persist in tribal thinking and behavior. And what would really be a pity is if the lesson of Auschwitz is that unless millions of innocents are murdered by governments, it doesn't matter. A few thousand here or there, in the name of some tribal idea of superiority can be overlooked.

Even if Auschwitz is 1,000 times worse that what I have read or imagined, what I already know has taught me it should never happen again, and nothing even remotely close to it should ever happen again. I don't need to go there to know and understand that.

Yes, I can agree that Auschwitz may not be for everyone (as the ad says about some medicine). But being there is a momentous experience. There is something about walking on the grounds and seeing the displays that shocks the soul. Surely this and other such sites are reminders of human depravity.

We know of other mass killings before and after the Nazi exterminations, e.g., living in Watertown, MA, we have many Armenians and a special museum about the massacres in Turkey a century ago. And son Timothy Longman who heads up the African Studies Center at Boston University authored a book on his own interviews: "Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda." And just turn on the news to get the latest.

We visited Dachau ....it was too touristy for me...Too neat.
The Holocoust Tower in the Jewish Museum in Berlin filled me with horror and made me cry.

For Ozarksbill Thank you so much for posting your memory to honor Dr. Harvey Saalberg. I was one of his students at Kent State University. He was a very serious and fine professor. One day he showed me the numbers tattooed on his arm from Auschwitz. I never forgot that. I wondered where he had gone after leaving KSU.

Sorry I meant to type Theresienstadt apparently there is no way to alter my original submission.