Trip to Auschwitz

[Paulus II]

Hi all,

This friday I will travel to Krakau for the weekend and will also visit Auschwitz, Plaszow and the nearby Schindler factory.
Though these places are well documented and photographed I wonder if anyone has any specific place in the city or the camps that they would like to be photographed.
Most of it can be seen on the internet but there may be some spots that someone here needs/wants in more detail or from a different angle than the abundance of photo's on websites and in books show.

If so, please let me know and I'll try to fulfill your request.

Paul

[haen2]

Dag Paul,
Don't even bother to make picturs; you can buy them by the hundreds.
Don't forget that this place is now a tourist attraction, and money to be made.
Harsch ?
Yes?
But true !
hn

[Roddoss72]

Unfortunatley Auschwitz is a money maker these days, commercialism knows no boundries.

[Paulus II]

Hmmm, is it that bad already?

Tourism, commercialism, money......I'd expected all that but wondered to what degree it would really be there.
Maybe they have a pony-ride too. I'm sure one day they will, and train rides to simulate the arrival in days gone by, light and sound shows and all that. As more time goes by the history fades and the money rises, try visiting any of the worlds pyramids without getting overrun by vendors .
To be honest the main reason for the trip is to see Krakau. Auschwitz is a bit of a side show. Like the mountain....Why do you climb it? Just because it's there .

Oh well, we'll see,

Best regards,
a somewhat sceptical Paul

[Annelie]

Death camps call for right to charge for entry ticket
Roger Boyes in Berlin
Some of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, now run as museums, could soon demand an entrance fee from visitors to help to finance educational facilities.

The prospect of paying to enter Dachau, where SS guards used to issue threats to inmates that they would leave only through the chimneys of the crematorium, has created controversy in Germany as the country considers how best to acknowledge its past.

Pieter Dietz de Loos, president of the International Dachau Committee, believes that there is no choice but to charge visitors. He says that the museum cannot meet its obligation to educate the young about the horrors of the Holocaust. Dachau, in a northern suburb of Munich, is visited by 800,000 people each year but the camp museum can only afford to pay one full-time educational assistant. Money is also running out to support Dachau survivors. “In five years we will be completely broke,” Mr Dietz de Loos said.

The idea of an entry ticket to the camps – museum officials at Buchenwald and Ravens-brück have also given warning of cash shortages – has outraged the Central Board of Jews in Germany. “These are graveyards,” a spokesman said. “You do not pay to mourn the dead.”

What appears to be the violation of a taboo is actually an argument about historical memory. There is no point, many camp museum directors argue, in preserving the sites of the Holocaust if staff are not present to explain how and why people were killed there.

“Between a third and a half of all requests for guided tours and educational support are having to be turned down,” said Günter Morsch, who supervises the memorial sites in Sach-senhausen, Ravensbrück and Brandenburg.

Former concentration camps in Germany are funded by both the federal and regional governments but the money, directors insisted, just about covered operating costs. Mr Morsch said that there was no extra funding for special exhibitions or seminars; the publication budget stretched to only two catalogues a year. The budget for Buchenwald camp has been capped since 1998.

Auschwitz, the biggest Nazi concentration camp, in southern Poland, receives more generous subsidies and has gained the support of Ron Lauder, the American philanthropost, to help to restore the splintering wooden barrack rooms of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The camps in Germany, in contrast, have attracted little private sponsorship: companies do not want their brand associated with the Holocaust. Indeed, it took many decades to persuade the Bavarian government to make big investments in the upkeep of Dachau – only in the late 1990s did the region pay for the construction of a hostel for visitors.

Even now the local council prefers to market itself as a pretty former artists’ colony rather than the place where more than 30,000 inmates died. Locals objected for years to the placing of signs directing visitors to the camp.

Of all the camps in Germany, Dachau usually stirs the deepest emotions among visitors. It was the first to be opened by the Nazis, in 1933, and was one of the last to be liberated. Most of the living quarters have been razed but one barrack room has row upon row of tiny beds.

The crematorium building, with stone ovens, stands outside the main museum building. Dachau was the scene of grisly medical experiments – inmates were forced to drink gallons of saltwater infected with malaria, or were dipped into frozen water tanks.

The issue is complicated by the competition among the former Nazi camps for funding against east German sites that commemorate the victims of Stalinism. Christian Democrats, including Bernd Neu-mann, who is in charge of cultural affairs in Angela Merkel’s Chancellery, are arguing that Nazi and Communist sites should be managed along the same principles because all involved were “victims of political dictatorship”.

The Central Board of Jews said that this terminology was blurring the historical record, equating Stalinist crimes with those of the Nazis and diminishing the Holocaust. Only free access to the old Nazi camps could keep the German memory straight, they argued, and money for teaching would have to be found elsewhere, not by the sale of tickets.

[Paddy Keating]

But which crematorium building? The one built by the Poles after the war or the original ones where millions were murdered? Anytime soon, I expect we shall be hearing that Disney has bought the site. Sorry if I seem bitter! I just came from the café across the road where KZ lager survivors congregate several times a week. I just spent an hour with a women of 83 who is still sexy...and has the tattoo. None of them has seen any of the reparations won by New York lawyers!

Oh no...baby...oh no...it's not really about the victims of those mad racial theories, is it? It's about m...o...n...e...y.

Money don't smell...

PK

[phylo_roadking]

I expect we shall be hearing that Disney has bought the site

...given what they always said about Uncle Walt, that would NOT suprise me at all!

[John W. Howard]

Hello Folks:
People will exploit any tragedy these days for their own ends: the parents of GI's killed in Iraq, the families of 911 victims, car accidents, work accidents, etc. There is no end. To my mind, there is no better reminder or memorial to the victims of the camps, than to keep the camps standing and in decent condition, and to continue to show the original films of camp conditions at liberation. There is no need for novels, movies, endless prattle, or philisophical idiocy. I think a reminder that more than just 6 million people died in those camps is also in order; the camps were a European tragedy, not just a Jewish one, and about as many non-Jewish Europeans died in those camps as Jewish ones, if I remember correctly.
At least the Germans have taken responsibility for the actions of the Nazis responsible for the extermination of the camp victims. It will be a cold day in Hell before the Russians take responsibility for forced collectivization and the slaughters done in their camps. Instead they go blithely on their way, poisoning people, murdering journalists, closing newspapers, and intimidating their neighbors, most recently Estonia. A note to those accompanying Jason Mark on his trip to Russia; do not eat the soup if you have ever said anything negative about Russia; it could be your last meal. Best wishes.

[Annelie]

At least the Germans have taken responsibility for the actions of the Nazis responsible for the extermination of the camp victims. It will be a cold day in Hell before the Russians take responsibility for forced collectivization and the slaughters done in their camps. Instead they go blithely on their way, poisoning people, murdering journalists, closing newspapers, and intimidating their neighbors, most recently Estonia. A note to those accompanying Jason Mark on his trip to Russia; do not eat the soup if you have ever said anything negative about Russia; it could be your last meal. Best wishes.

So true!

Never really wanted to explore Russia but I was softening these last
years one day hoping to visit the Hermitage but now
as you say John, I wouldn't trust the soup.

[phylo_roadking]

; do not eat the soup if you have ever said anything negative about Russia; it could be your last meal

....and just think, it used to be AMERICANS who advocated "nuke 'em 'til they glow!" for RUSSIANS!!!

[Paddy Keating]

Hello Folks:
People will exploit any tragedy these days for their own ends: the parents of GI's killed in Iraq, the families of 911 victims, car accidents, work accidents, etc. There is no end. To my mind, there is no better reminder or memorial to the victims of the camps, than to keep the camps standing and in decent condition, and to continue to show the original films of camp conditions at liberation. There is no need for novels, movies, endless prattle, or philisophical idiocy. I think a reminder that more than just 6 million people died in those camps is also in order; the camps were a European tragedy, not just a Jewish one, and about as many non-Jewish Europeans died in those camps as Jewish ones, if I remember correctly.
At least the Germans have taken responsibility for the actions of the Nazis responsible for the extermination of the camp victims. It will be a cold day in Hell before the Russians take responsibility for forced collectivization and the slaughters done in their camps. Instead they go blithely on their way, poisoning people, murdering journalists, closing newspapers, and intimidating their neighbors, most recently Estonia. A note to those accompanying Jason Mark on his trip to Russia; do not eat the soup if you have ever said anything negative about Russia; it could be your last meal. Best wishes.

This is one of the best posts I've ever read on this website!

PK

[KG voss]

Indeed, thi is a great post, I wish there were more people thinking this way...
As for Annelie, I highly encourage you to go to Russia, there are numerous great things to visit and to see..... just don't eat the soup.. and beware if a nice big tall guy invite you for a vodka drink

[phylo_roadking]

A cup of tea glowing with nice blue Cherenkov radiation handed to you by a waiter who hasn't shaved for four days is a dead giveaway too.....

[phylo_roadking]

I wish there were more people thinking this way...

Well, I'm quite sure anyone on here who was in any Western armed services in the last 15-20 years will confirm that during any wargame/exercise NOT aimed at the Gulf, its still taken as read who the "opposing" forces in any possible war will be...or was up to the late '90s anyway...

[Njorl]

But which crematorium building? The one built by the Poles after the war or the original ones where millions were murdered?

Paddy, please re-read the article provided by Annelie.

Regards,

MJU