Going for a weekend to Auschwitz concentration camp next week with a few blokes.

VERY interesting and hopefully will make for a good time armed with my camera for some good pictures too.....

I know it is not to everyones tastes but has anyone been????

Looking forward to it....

 

Not beed but going to be going in the next couple of years - This place has always fascinated me

 

guy I work with went and said he right enjoyed it, got to feel a bit strange walking round though knowing what happened. Have seen some awesome pictures come back from their too

 

My grandad died there

 

Thats the plan......i am going all out with the Canon so watch this space for some pictures.....

Paul.....always fasinated me aswell.......in a morbid kind of way

 

A few years back I went to Dachau (on my own stag weekend!)

Anyway, seems strange to say but really glad I went. A couple of the lads missed it due to hangovers and I think regret not dragging themselves out of their beds.

 

Well, nothing you see was built by the Germans LOL, all built by the Russians immediately after the war.

 

Tiff, a good friend of mine and his missus went there a few years ago. Its a very very cold place (not weather wise i mean), but it was something she'd meant to do for years. Very quiet and reflective atmosphere wise, with some very knowledgable guides.

Although she's read up on it for years, she said she wouldnt go again. Once was enough.

Very moving visit from start to finish.

Look forward to the pics when you return

 

I'd quite like to go to there too and have a strange interest in going to places like that.

I bet you come back with some cracking pics that capture the place well.

 

Tiff you will find the place unreal and eri(sp) and allways on your mind that you think your being watched every where you go!!!!

 

Not been yet but it's somewhere i will go soon, i think it'd be a really interesting place in a strange kind of way.

 

i hope to go there in the next couple years always wanted to go there and a few other WW2 places.

 

I live in Germany. Right near the Bergen Belsen concentration camp.

I went there a few months ago as they have an exhibition there. No birds fly over the area. There's mounds with markings on to give an idea of how many people are buried there.

Very much an eye opening experience. Makes you feel like you are being watched all the time.

Definitely a place that I would recommend that people visit.

 

I worked in Dachau for 4 years , simmilar thing , but not used , unlike where you will be going.
Will be an interesting trip, and hard to take in the reality of what went on, my wife is German from Liepzig and they had to go to these places as school field trips, very disturbing.

 

my sister took my old man over years back, both found it very interesting, had heard of the fact birds don't fly over - is that true??

 

I want to go someday as well as Oradour-sur-Glane in France

 

Same here, will defo be going in the next few years.

 

Was going to go here on me trip I done last month, but was to foooked from driving I never made the stop over, gutted now like.

 

I was in Krakow on a stag do this year and it was booked for a day trip, but a very late night and a late awakening ment I missed it.

Like Krakow though so may well go back.

 

So did mine mate, he fell out the machine gun nest when he was pissed one night.

Seriously though i've been looking in to these tours and i think it must be a quite a reality shock, of how things used to be.

 

I went in August, it was so unreal. The village seemed like a film set it, especially as we were driving towards it and seeing it appear on the horizon.

Going in the Church was the worst part, just knowing what had happened in there.

If you go make sure you go in the museum and get the "talking guide" headphone thing, then walk round the village.

Just a few pictures..

 

a few of me mates went last year, apparently this is how the visit went

1 lad got off the coach and did an army roll across the car park.

when they were watching the video about the the prisoners one of the lads shouted out "you could play a tune on them ribs he's like a piano"

then when they were getting the tour 1 of me mates was making machine gun noises and doing the actions of shooting people.

Yes i know so right lunatics

 

I wouldnt call them lunatics i would just call it disrespectful but just my opinion

 

Very real when i was young, being born at the end of the war it was rammed into our brains. Reading this I feel perhaps i should go to Auschwitz & show my respect to those killed there.

 

more like!

 

Pricks!

Been there because part of my History dissertation in Uni was about it. Words can't explain what people went through in that camp, between gas chambers and barbaric medical experiments, those poor people deserve nothing but respect...over 3 million of them!

 

I don't understand? Why did they go if they were only going to act like loud, lower class, uneducated, ignorant retards?

 

It was 1 of me mates brothers birtdays and they went to prague for a long weekend and he wanted to go.

I personally dont undersstand why most of them went either as apparenly they drunk all the way there on the coach and its hardly somewhere you go when your pissed up and wanting to have a laugh. Probably ruined the day for most the other people there to unfortunatly.

 

Take your iPod, and listen to Slayer's "Angel Of Death" whilst there.

(and no, contrary to popular belief, that song is not a praisal of Auschwitz or the atrocities that happened there - it's actually lyrics based on a poem by a former Jewish captive of WWII, who survived)

 

not long now.....

 

Bring me back a bar of soap tiff

 

yup, shame its commercialsed , or it felt that way to me now

 

My grandfather perished in Auschwitz...in an unusual fashion as well...

 

Chilling place im sure, although Im not convinced that what remains can get any real sense of the true horror of the place across.

But that said, its good that something remains to remember those innocent people murdered at the hands of an evil regime, especially as warning to the rest of us of what can happen if we allow ourselves and our government to be motivated by hate.

A truely horrific time in mankind's history.

 

What's changed Chip??

 

Although people are still being shitty to each other all over the world, I cant think of any modern equivalent to what happened to the jewish people of germany (and occupied lands such as poland) at the hands of their own government and countrymen.

The sheer scale and efficiency of what happens is mind boggling.

Even more so for places like Treblanka than Auschwitz

 

Don't forget the horrendous fate that befell others in the camps as well...

My grandfather wasn't even Jewish... :-(

 

You'd be surprised Chip.... I completed a dissertation surrounding Mayan culture and barbaric 21st century rituals and torture, and not much has changed...unless what my military friends and family tell me is untrue. Nothing has changed, except that ethnic cleansing isn't as media blown as it used to be, just to keep naiive people in the dark. I'd happily walk around Warsaw in the 30's than a dark street full of knife wielding hoodies of today!

 

You are missing my point, im not saying people arent still killing each other, they simply arent doing so as efficiently as they were back then at these camps.

At Treblinka, around a million people were shipped in, killed, disposed of, in a year!
Its actually a triumph of logistics how they managed to get through so many people with the relatively limited technology available to them at the time.

 

One of the forgotten group of victims is many of the guards who were posted there and lost their minds as a result.