"He who does not remember the past is condemned to repeat it."

[miss_soap]

So, this weekend we went to Krakow. We had a great time, usual stuff, lots of cocktails. But that's not a write-up which needs writing; we've done it all before

Comments

[miss_soap]

Typo; now corrected and amended to proper German spelling. I'd originally gone for 'Hoess' but obviously it's Höss.

[hsb]

IIRC, Hoess is as correct at the version with the umlaut. I was always taught they were interchangeable at school, and the version without accents is apparently becoming more common these days, because of typesetting.

H

[hsb]

at=as

Sorry

[thepaintedone]

The truly horrifying part is that from a perspective of motivation and intent the German Holocaust was not an isolated incident, man has been treating his fellow man in terrible ways like this throughout recorded history and in many parts of the world still is.

What the Germans did was to bring modern industrialisation to the process and took it to a new level of scale. In some ways they did to society what the machine gun had done to the battlefield in WW1.

None of which is to take anything away from the horror and power of what you've written, that scale has a message all of its own. But what worries me is that as you say we're only a couple of generations away from that, and Germany both before and after the wars is not that different from our society.

[miss_soap]

No indeed. Had the Hutu militia had access to more modern methods than the machete in 1994 I imagine they'd have adopted them with alacrity.

Civilisation is a myth; I don't even believe that the UK is more than two secure meals away from massacres in the street anyway.

[thepaintedone]

Sad to say I think you're largely right. The cynicim I have towards many of the more 'enlightened' proposals for running society that are discussed is that at heart they tend to have a basic reliance on people being decent to each other, and everything I've ever seen suggests to me that humans are selfish creatures (just like most other animals on the planet) and en mass ar simply incapable of making that sort of thing work. We can do amazing things, but I think if you stand back far enough and look at us as a species, true altruism and decency tends to be the exception rather than the rule.

[misspotsitt]

I would "like" to go to Auschwitz. I was something of a holocaust geek at school, I have no idea why. I guess there was something about the horror of it all which was almost intriguing to my teenage mind? I knew the names of most of the camps at one point. Mind you we studied it a great deal at school from the second year onwards and several of my friend's grandparents are holocaust survivors (interestingly mostly not my Jewish friends, but my friends who are of Polish or Roma descent, there are a lot in Reading). The Jewish parts of my family have lived in the UK for a long time so were unaffected, and my family itself converted so long ago and have nothing to do with Judaism, so even if they were, it would be very very distant.

My friend Anne's grandfather was part of the British forces that liberated one of the camps. She said he never ever spoke about it, I can't say I blame him.

[miss_soap]

So many people are connected to it, even distantly. My boss is the son of Hungarian Jews who fled when the ghettoisation began. Had they not, chances are they'd have ended up in Auschwitz.

[princesssulky]

My father was half Jewish, but didn't find out until after his Father died. My grandfather never, ever talked about it, except to once say to my mother that a lot of our family tree died out in those camps. My mother was the one to tell my father of his family history!

I'm not sure I could bring myself to go, and yet I think everyone should.

[miss_soap]

Having now been, I think everyone should.

[inulro]

I've been aware for years that there were many camps; yet till you posted that list only knew the names of the "famous" ones.

[miss_soap]

Those are only the Polish ones; there were camps in Germany and Czechoslovakia too.

[inulro]

OK - I thought some of those names (particularly Brno) were Czech/Slovak and Hungarian but had noticed the lack of German names.

[miss_soap]

The full list of all camps with countries is here.

[grim_tim]

None of us can come close to imagining the horror of what those people suffered. Not even close.

I agree, and suspect the enormity of it just shuts people down. Seeing the holocaust memorials in Père-Lachaise was enough to give me the major bleak; seeing something more tangible must be so fundamentally overwhelming that no appropriate response is possible. It's obvious from your writing style how deeply it's affected you.

Thank you for posting this. I don't think I shall be whining about my problems for a while.