Remembering Auschwitz

I know this isn't relevant but...when I was a child and found out why I didn't have grandparents, I used to fantasise that they would be walking down the street to meet me for the first time and that the report of their deaths was a horrible mistake. I used to imagine that maybe they did survive and just didn't know how to find my father.
That was at a time when he'd been told they had been deported 'to an unknown destination'. Once we knew it was Auschwitz, and had a definite date of arrest, all that childish, faint hope was gone.

lemongrove blames the Poles for the camps but Poles who resisted were sent to the camps and treated terribly. Read The Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly for an account of "the rabbits" women who were subjected to horrific medical experiments. And yes the British and the Americans knew about the camps very early in the war although I think they probably failed to appreciate the real horrors that were happening in them.

No Maddyone not at all. Thanks for asking.
Sorry I didn’t express myself well though.
I have had lots of positive relationships with any number of Jewish people (and people of other faiths of course!). I have never heard these things said by people I thought were friends.

There are too many people in this world with no compassion or no empathy - or both.

I heard on the radio the story of one young woman hiding Jews from the Nazis. She was told she was brave and a hero. She said, no, “it’s what anyone would do”.

Rowantree is right. We didn’t do all we could and we are still not doing all we should.

I think I also heard that the British Government knew about the camps but didn't want to divert resources to destroying them. Perhaps they were worried about unintentionally killing a lot of the Jewish inmates.

I don't see why they couldn't have targeted the watchtowers and outer walls as that would have helped some of the stronger inmates to escape but there was a lot of anti-semitism in Britain before the last world war and the deaths of a few Jews was not considered important.

‘That people in Britain, not Tommy Robinson and his ilk, but ordinary, everyday people, can say such... appalling things, shows that anti semitism is alive and well in Britain today.‘

Tommy Robinson is pro-Jewish and Zionist and far-right white supremacists hate him for it. Not everything you read in the papers is true! If you look at his speech to the Oxford Union on YouTube, it gives a better picture of him.

Everybody knew exactly what was going on in all of the camps.

It was also covered up by calling it "a conspiracy theory".

Research Cambodia, Sarajevo, Yemen etc etc ... same human nature -

There but for the grace of god go I... (we would all like to think we were above such evil, but we are not)

www.amazon.co.uk/Return-Auschwitz-Kitty-Hart-Moxon/dp/0755101367?tag=gransnetforum-21

This tells you exactly how it was all accomplished - turning people, like you and I, into monsters is all too easy.

It's not even in the past - it's happening somewhere in the world right now.

You only have to read through some threads on GN to see that there will always be personalities drawn to (guard's jobs) lord over others with their spite, given real power these individuals would show no mercy.

Our "camp guards" are the "medical assessors" in the UK who, under orders, have overseen the avoidable deaths of many many sick people.

The really horrible thing about the Holocaust is that human beings are capable of these atrocities.

We have absolutely no guarantees that something similar will never happen again. Antisemitismen is increasing again and many people in Europe dislike immigrants, especially Muslims.

It has taken a very long time for most Germans to come to terms with Naziism, even our generation born during the war or after it have felt guilty. Something they cannot be, as they are either infants in arms or not even born when the war ended.

The countries that Germany occupied have likewise had to deal with the guilt, and so should the USA and Britain which like most other countries denied refugees the right of entry, sending many back to the concentration camps.

Hello, I am a student journalist at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. I am producing a magazine about the older generation and was wondering if anyone who has any direct personal experiences with a concentration camp would be willing to be interviewed regarding it?

The piece will be for internal assessment towards my grade and I believe this would be an important read for many.

Thank you for your time and if anyone would be willing please let me know.

I visited Dachau ( the first of the German concentration camps) some years ago and was told that the local people who tried to object to the activities in the camp found themselves inmates.

What a touching programme directly from Auschwitz yesterday.We visited in October last year,and I was there with them in spirit yesterday, those poor survivors re living the horrors, and maybe their last visit to this concentration camp.We must continue to remind people of other generations about this atrocity, it should never happen again, and should never be forgotten.

ananimous I am not sure that it is true that "Everybody knew exactly what was going on in all of the camps." My Bavarian friends certainly did not know and when the camps were liberated it was a terrible shock to the Allied Forces.

I agree with those who say that were we to have lived in Germany at the time we would most probably have been part of the regime, carefully groomed and never told the truth. Hitler was a genius in leading people so that they believed him and when he started to become well-known he seemed like a good man, creating the right things for a down-trodden country after WW1 and giving people hope. Such was his and his party's cunning and horrific power of controlling a whole country.

We must always remember that genocide has been attempted more than once since then and we have not always intervened.

We must always remember the Roma people that Hitler tried to exterminate and who do not get the help and support today that other survivors and their descendants receive.

We must always remember the defenceless people with disabilities, especially learning disabilities, who were given the most cruel treatments of all, often put to extremely frightening and painful torture in the name of medical research.

That mankind can be brainwashed, that the truth can so easily be withheld from whole nations of people, that a small group of evil, determined, psychopathic and brilliantly clever people can subject so many into the biggest hell on earth, we must always remember and always be on the alert for such possibilities at any time.

I’m sorry to hear about your family’s fate Rowantree, but I will not agree that Britain didn’t do a lot to help and to win the war. America did NOTHING till they were attacked at Pearl Harbour, despite Britain constantly asking for help. Then they charged us and made massive profits from us for armaments and we were paying America back until very recently, in 2000 and something.
The Germans are the ones to direct anger against not the British, who stood alone in fighting the Nazis for two solid years!
Winston Churchill did know about Auschwitz part way through the war, but it was judged that the best way to help the Jews and others was to wage and win total war. It worked. Europe was liberated. Russia and other allies also knew about what was happening, but the allies all judged that the way to help was to liberate Europe, sooner rather than later. Plus, whatever we might say now, it was simply unimaginable to normal people that mechanised murder would be invented and employed. Concentration camps were known about, after all Dachau was in operation as a concentration camp from 1933. But it wasn’t a killing camp, it only had gas chambers built late in the war, and they were never used. I know this as I have visited Dachau.
DON’T blame the British, blame the perpetrators.

Thank you to Britain who in 1939 saved both my parents, who were children and all four grandparents, two of whom were blind. USA refused the blind, they were escorted off the ship.

I've recently read the story of Witold Pilecki, a hugely brave man who actually went into Auschwitz .
For over 2 years while there, he passed on intelligence.His first message was blunt: Bomb Auschwitz. Even if it meant killing everyone inside, himself included, it would be merciful. Conditions were horrifying, and the Nazis had to be stopped, he implored.
The book is by Jack Fairweather...

Have listened to the news programs on BBC and ITV about the holocaust commemorations. Never heard the word Germans mentioned once. Was all the Nazis without mentioning who they were at all. As if they came from outer space and disappeared when vanquished.
My family lost a grandfather fighting these germans. Leaving grandma to bring up her four young children on her own. Having a difficult time managing without much state aid.

I cannot disagree with you more.

Everybody
in all governments knew exactly what was being done in the camps.

It slowly filtered down to the populace, yes.
But all the top people knew.

How do you know that ananimous?

It was known about at a later stage in the war. The gas chambers weren’t in use in Auschwitz until 1943.

There were small gas chambers used before that. The mechanised killing of thousands at a time was unimaginable to people unless they were part of the perpetrators or lived nearby. Treblinka started to gas large numbers in 1942.

It is so painful to read from our Jewish Grans that they have experienced antisemitism. I was aware of it as a child in the 1950s, particularly with a disgusting phrase my mother used. my mother and her friends, living in the beautiful country villages of south Surrey, were not only antisemitic but racist also. It was born of ignorance. Yet my dear Father was not like it at all and one day spoke very sternly to my mother about this phrase she used and that was how I learned it was an antisemitic phrase. I was only about 6 as I can remember which class I was in at school. I was shocked at my mother. Later I was shocked at my God Mother who used a horrible expression about a Black woman working on the Train platform in London. I began to dislike this group of village women and vowed to leave the village when I grew up and to be myself.
Then, many years later when I was in my thirties, a woman came to teach at our fairly prestigious public school from another such school. The first time I met her she began to run down Jewish people who she said sent their children to the school at which she previously taught. It was horrific.

Yes, that was some time ago. But this cancer of anti- Semitism pervades our country. I have been told by my Jewish friends from time to time, one particularly when he wrote his family story. He found out what happened to his Grandparents in different Camps in the war and how his mother had fled to Paris then to England. He still suffers from remarks that are so painful it breaks his heart. How can people be like this?
I think that there are two sorts of people in Britain and basically they are the decent, empathic, caring and unselfish ones, and then the others - selfish, unempathic, demanding their "rights" types. There is nothing in between as far as I have experienced.

To all Jewish people I want to say a very deep apology for those ignorant and selfish British people who haven't a clue how cruel and hurtful they are being when they say such horrible things to you. I am so sorry that in Britain we have not managed to teach everyone what that terrible painful scar you carry is like, since the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust. I hope and pray that you may never be hurt again by any anti Semitic comments. I know this is unlikely so I pray that you grow in strength to ignore these ignorant and wicked people and never let them hurt you. There are many of us who are so overwhelmed with grief and sorrow at what Jewish people have suffered and would do anything we could to hold you up and support you.

The Wannsee Conference only took place in January 1942. How could anyone have known about mass killings in gas chambers when they were only being planned in January 1942. It was called the Final Solution.

Tillybelle,

What a lovely, caring post. I agree with every word you have written.
I will join you in offering apologies to all our Jewish friends who have ever suffered an anti Semitic remark in Britain. I offer my apologies on behalf of those too ignorant to apologise themselves.

Jesus said, ‘Love thy neighbour.’
The Jewish community in Britain are our neighbours.

The documentary I mentioned above showed women from the local town being taken into a camp after it was liberated. They obviously had no idea what had been going on in there. They were smiling and jolly on the way in. Some were collapsing and fainting in shock at what they saw.

No trisher........Lemongrove does not ‘blame the Poles for the camps’ !!
If you read my post properly, you would see I was asking the question, do the Poles as a nation feel collected guilt.A good number of Polish people gave up details of where Jewish neighbours lived and collaborated in many ways with the Germans.
Lemongrove entirely blames Hitler and the Nazis for the death camps.

maddyone. Thank you. Thank you too for reminding us of the words of Jesus.

Good posts from you maddyone ??