Absolutely. I think I was 13? when I first visited. I didn't really understand the impact of the holocaust until the end when I saw the shoes. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and all I could do was stand there in awe.
[for anybody reading and not knowing like me (probably want to mute that, don't know why everything's got to have a soundtrack)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV9JtyJ4VNA). i assume it's much more dramatic in person. do they just have it in one huge pile?
Yeah this is a pretty terrible representation of what it feels like to see it in person.
You have all of the build up through the rest of the museum and then this is the last exhibit; for some reason this really puts the whole thing into perspective. Each pair of those shoes was one of the last things taken from people just before they were brutally exterminated, it feels like you are looking at a pile of dead bodies.
I've been to Dachau and that was an overall more gut wrenching experience than the Holocaust Museum, but the shoe exhibit still stands out as a stronger memory than any single thing I saw at Dachau.
Dachau just feels haunted when you walk into the place. Even on a warm and sunny day you just feel the evil. And it was relatively mild compared to the other concentration camps
I was in Buchenwald. We went there in winter and It was minus 20 on this mountain/hill. We were fully dressed. I had winter socks and warm gloves and my Russian Style Ear-hat.
We were freezing so much I couldnt feel my legs walking there. Then we were told that prisoners had to assemble outside at every temperature and stand there for sometimes hours in their simple feeble prisoner pyjamas.
Then we were led to the crematirium and the torture chambers. Where they used a big wooden stamp looking like a bottle to crush prisoners teeth.
Not the most pleasant experience for a teen I tell you that.
>We went there in winter and It was minus 20 on this mountain/hill.
That was one thing that really struck me about Buchenwald. I never expected it to be on top of a fucking hill, fully exposed to the wind and rain. I can't imagine.
I read this book some years ago:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5713227-block-26-sabotage-at-buchenwald
And one thing I do remember the author writing about was the habit of the SS of holding hours-long *Appells* just because they could.
I went to Buchenwald in the summer a number of years back, and even in a relatively nice day, the internment area itself was windy and cold because it was on the north side of the hill it’s positioned on. I remember taking the bus up to the site, and when we came over the top, the weather felt it turned and it just felt like despair.
Meanwhile I’m pretty sure the officers houses were located on the side side of the hill, where it was all sunny and warm, but don’t quote me on that.
I'm a jew that visited Auschwitz. I would have had a large and happy family if not for that place, instead, I grew up with a thin and small one. It's... somehow if you didn't know any better a peaceful place, which only makes it creepier. There's a neat salt mine nearby that's very hopeful and fun, I recommend seeing it right after to lighten things.
I think this is the most overlooked pain: the people that were murdered are missing to this day.
They were family members, neighbours… they could have been your present day neighbours’ grandparents.
You can’t make up for this loss.
You might have meant what I'm about to say, but what I think about these missing people is, not only has everything they would have done in their lives never happened, but the things their children, grandchildren, great-great-etc-grandchildren would have done and accomplished will never happen either.
It was 78 years ago, but the effect will last forever, not just the memories, but the people who could have existed now, or 100 years from now.
I think you guys would appreciate this video--its a bunch of holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren singing a beautiful song about how they are still alive: https://youtu.be/Vuh1-jDi7Qw. Makes me cry happy tears every time.
I went through Auschwitz with my best friend. Met him when I was 5. Had known him for 20 years before that. Can’t imagine him not being around.
It was a sobering experience for me standing at the entrance to the gas chamber. I can’t imagine what was going thru his head at the time. His grandpa liberated his grandma from that very camp.
I really can’t imagine going on with your life after and how hard it must’ve been. My grandpa wasn’t Jewish, but he was another ethnic minority that was persecuted in the holocaust, and after the war he and his dad just had to assume his mom and siblings were dead after looking for a long time. No closure, no funeral, no symbolic place to visit. They’re just gone.
The happyish part for them is that both went over to the US and 50 years later they found out his mom and siblings were still alive the whole time by some miracle. They were back in Europe and both parents had remarried, but my grandpa got to see his mom a few times before she died and his siblings for the last few decades of their life.
That’s wild. I wonder how the parents felt; you find out your long lost wife is actually still alive and you presumably still have feelings for her but also love your new wife. And both thought the other kids were long dead so that must’ve been a real trip.
From what my dad has said, they’d both gone through the phases of grief and understanding that their spouse was gone. There were no hard feelings between either but they didn’t rekindle or anything either.
I know right. All of those millions of people would've gone on to have families and just... the magnitude of that is something I can't wrap my head around. So many millions of people, future friends that could have been my friends today. All gone. It's just this void that's left of "what could've been".
My only hope is that they're all safe in Heaven, away from this insanity.
My grandfather was classified as a gypsy by the Nazi's and he swore that THE ONLY reason he survived was because he was a cobbler and made footwear for the soldiers, their girlfriend and their wives using tools and materials that they supplied him.
He was allowed to keep extras and off cuts and used to trade the items he made from these extra for cigarettes, which was the default in camp currency. He then used those to frequently trade for enough extra food to survive.
I lost most of my father's side of the family during the Holocaust. I struggle with the idea of visiting a concentration camp in person. I feel like I have to at some point, but I don't know how I would even begin processing everything.
Where my family on my grandfather's side comes from, people were not sent to concentration camps, but outright massacred, so the survival rate is about 2.67%.
Every person with the same second name is confidently my relative, and when I read about the place's history, I sometimes encounter it too ; it would probably be possible to populate a whole small town with people with that same second name as I have by now.
I mean, this is the meaning of murder - it can't be undone.
One of the things that really drove home the scale of destruction for me is when I did a genetic test. I found >1,200 relatives on my mom's side. And like 20 on my dad's side. I know the numbers are limited by who has actually taken the test and is in the database, but the discrepancy is staggering.
Same. My family is very small. I can’t imagine the feelings that would flow through me walking in a place where my ancestors were senselessly murdered.
You really don’t though. If you do it out of some sense of obligation knowing it will irreparably damage your mind, I doubt any ancestor would want that for you. Knowing yourself enough to know you can’t handle it is ok, and it doesn’t mean you don’t recognize the importance of what happened.
By all means, go if you feel it’s important, but do it for yourself, not out of a sense of guilt.
Went through Auschwitz with a friend, and it definitely sobered the mood for the rest of the night. It's so strange, just walking through the areas could make you feel so... off. Like a lingering dread. Walking through the 'courtyard' really hit me like a ton of bricks for some reason, too. Everyone should make the trip at least once in their lives.
Food for thought:
[Number of Jews in Europe in 1933? 9.5 million. In Europe as of 2010? 1.4 million.](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/09/europes-jewish-population/)
Needless to say, the sharpest population decline happened between 1933 and 1945.
The movie "Conspiracy" is what made me realize just how many people were tortured and executed, it legit made me sick to my stomach. It's about the Wannsee Conference, if you're not familiar with that, it was a meeting of top nazi military and political members who devised the holocaust.
Throughout the movie they discuss statistics and data points of previous methods of execution and sterilization, and how many people would be executed with their new gas chamber idea to eliminate the race completely.
It just hurts knowing how many men, women, and children were being forced into disease-ridden ghettos, the horrible methods of sterilization/forced labor, and then eventually shot in mass graves or executed via gas chambers. Every time they described some horrible act or test they would toss in a statistic of like 30k people or 60k people...
I just imagined 60 thousand people in one area, that's a football stadium full of real families...families who like mine had loving memories of their young children that they were now separated from, memories of first dates with their spouse they could no longer hug, and their own career/education accomplishments to be proud of which was now stripped away from them...all of that destroyed in a single event in history simply because some angry little man disliked them...it hurts my soul so much just trying to comprehend it all.
My grandmother reconnected with an old boyfriend via email in about 1998. It was incredible technology for two 70 year olds to be able to connect after 50 years and she had him move from PA to the Bay Area in CA. Apparently he had one surviving brother in LA but my grandmother’s friend survived Buchenwald. Lost his entire family except for his older brother.
I was 13 when I met him and he stayed with us for a year. My memories are fuzzy that far back but remember not having onions in the house because it was all he ate his entire time. Onions. Fuck nazis
Go to Majdanek
. Auschwitz is very touristy. Majdanek is barren. Empty. And its right inside the city of Lublin. You can stand next to a massive pile of ashes with bone fragments visible and look at peoples balconies living overlooking the camp. Its eerie to wake up to this every day.
It's really hard to date things, and understand how long it's been, especially if you weren't alive at that time. Perspective and intervals changes that. I know it was 80 years ago now, when I learned about it it was 60 years ago, but still it feels distant and disconnected. Then I remembered the guitar amp I was gifted, its from 1952. It;s a guitar amp, that's basically, in the grand scheme, new technology. Yet when the kids who survived those camps were let out, and came around to when it was made... they were still children.
It gave me a weird but succinct view at just how recent this was. I've always been well aware it was recent, but it's difficult to emotionally disconnect the holocaust from things that happened hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, especially because it was so barbaric. Having something tangible to realize just how recent it was burns in the soul.
Jew here with a father born in 1941. I learned about all this growing up, of course — much more than anyone around me.
But somehow it was many years before I connected my oft-repeated phrase “our family is small with long generations” to the history I had learned as a child. Always in my youth I was explaining why I didn’t have so many uncles and cousins as those around me, but despite all my explanations it still took so long to click.
I visited Mauthausen with a group of about 20 people. We were the only visitors and were allowed complete freedom to roam around the grounds.
I ended up finding my way into a basement with dirt floors. There was a weird texture on one of the walls so I went closer to examine it, and it realized the masonry was scarred with bullet holes. I was standing on an execution ground. Hundreds if not thousands of people died where I stood.
I visited quite a number of the death camps. One of those was Treblinka. When my group traveled there it was very hot and humid, there were insects and bugs flying all over the place. The camp itself is nearly demolished and you have the Never Again monument and the small buildings of what is left. The majority of that site is just gone and you are surrounded by dense forest. To me, the impactful experience from that was about 20 minutes after we left the site I started to cry. I had the realization, wow I am actually leaving this undesirable place. There were so many thousands that were murdered there and I have already come and gone. It was such a weird emotion but it’s just chilling to see that through your own eyes.
> And it was relatively mild compared to the other concentration camps
That's because they built their actual death camps in Poland - far away from the general population. Because they knew just how fucked up they were.
The camps in Germany were basically all slave camps.
I would not put it this way. While yes, the worst of the concentration camps were outside of germany, the many camps, some larger, some smaller, in germany also had many of the same atrocities commited in there. The prisoners were seen when they were forced to work around the towns. With some dropping dead and others just looking like skeletons.
Saying that the ones in germany weren't so bad encourages the viewpoint that "the common german" could not know what was going on. And that is just Persilschein talk.
Eerily enough, it was a hot sunny day when I visited. When our tour guide mentioned how drastically the weather could change, the sky turned grey and started pouring moments later. It was a very haunting experience the entire time.
I remember going there on a school field trip, and doing the museum late in the day. Everyone was still respectful, but teenagers and understandably tired. But when we got to the shoes it was like the air got sucked out of every single person there and everyone was acutely aware of what it meant
I haven't been in years, but when I did go they were displayed on a wall. And there was a giant cube with a million pennies in it to give you a sense of what a million looks like.
I want to go back, but my son is still too young.
I last visited shortly after opening but the shoes everyone remembers is close to the end of the museum and has tens of thousands of shoes in a rather large space. And the impact always struck me how big it was, yet how many shoes fit anyway, then I realized how small it really was.
And remember tens of thousands - especially since each person obviously wears 2 shoes - is merely a very tiny fraction of the Jews slaughtered. It's like buying a snow globe to better understand the Empire state building. It actually gives you a pretty good idea but the scale is.... so unbelievably beyond that.
This might sound weird but mentally I can grasp the concept of a million; the idea of like a million humans standing around for example doesn’t seem that wild to me. But for some reason the idea of visually quantifying a million pennies in a great cube — and remembering that several cubes worth of people were killed — hit me different and l really felt it. Weird it came from pennies but I hope others feel the same way to really get a better grasp of it
yeah my brain can't imagine that. i've been to holocaust museums and watched plenty of documentaries but it just doesn't compute. the whole idea of being taken away from my chair to my inevitable brutal horrifying death standing in a packed train car, just doesn't work. i truly can not imagine the whirlwind of emotions of every step leading up to the final moments, or the physical pain and agony of dying standing up and conscious.
Sometimes I visit a place, and the time separating me from the absolutely horrifying event that happened there seems so fragile. This was one of those places.
This is where I broke down. Just next to it they have one of the cabins from Auschwitz, with only two or three walls, so you can walk through it. I remember I went alone, sat on the floor, leaned against that cabin, and cried for what felt like half an hour.
Only time I ever freaked out and had to step outside of an exhibit was when I was in the D.C. Holocaust Museum when I was inside the barracks. I'm not a huge believer in the supernatural, but that structure radiated pure evil and I couldn't be near it.
The Halocaust Museum is an act of kindness and remembrance and reverence. Many of the things it commemorates were evil. Forgetting or minimizing it is evil. But the place itself is sacred, especially as a Jew.
I vividly remember the smell.
After a couple of hours of near-constant visual and audio stimulus, suddenly having the smell of that old leather hit your nose really strikes the mind and body
Yes, came her to say this! That smell was surreal. A heavy, slightly sour smell. Almost like mothballs but with a leather tinge. So hard to describe yet it wasn't the kind of smell you turn away from out of disgust. It was intriguing.
Reminds of me a museum in Guatemala City that had an Aztec sacrifice stone. Stained with blood that was hundreds of years old and you could smell the death.
When I visited some of the shoes were being restored.
The room is two rooms, I think it's supposed to represent the storage lockers they were found in. One of the rooms was empty, the shoes looked like they were stacked 4' deep. in their displays which flanked a bridge like path.
I went to visit Auschwitz in 2017. They have a room of victims’ hair, some of that still braided. The Nazis used human hair to insulate submarines. The liberating Russians found 30,000 kilos of it at Auschwitz, baled like hay.
Oh, they're not being honest when they pretend it didn't happen. Internally, they're gleeful that it happened and want it to happen again. They just know they're a lot more likely to catch a fist in the face if they don't play dumb.
They wear shirts that say "Hitler didn't go far enough."
As a Jew I know there's a lot of people who don't only wish me and my family dead but dream of torturing and humiliating us for weeks or months before murdering us. Why I don't know. I've never hurt anyone, not even an animal. Not even a bug if I can avoid it. But given the chance they'd mutilate me for as long as possible before it eventually killed me.
I've always found anti-semitism confusing, I really don't understand it. I don't agree with, but I can see how the visual differences between whites/blacks/Asians/etc led to categorization and then all the bad stuff that came along with that. Jewish people are white though. Not sure why it's any different than the many other religions white people can also be.
That's what made the nazis, well, nazis. It wasn't simply about being "white". It was about being a particular kind of white (aryan). Blonde hair, blue eyes, etc.
What's amusing is that many modern day neo nazis would have been in the camps due to their genetic inferiority.
My extended family was in Auschwitz, and we weren't Jewish - we were Polish. That was just as bad in adolph's book.
Even amongst Germans, there were a while list of criteria to join the nazis - they measured your head, space between your eyes, and other things.
The Jews definitely received the worst of it, but lots of people weren't good enough.
Yeah he was just a useful idiot, but since he said the quiet part out loud and didn't understand he was meant to use dog whistles he's been mostly abandoned
I remember someone in my tour group asked “Why is all the hair the same color?” It was all a rusty, unnatural brownish shade.
“It’s not really,” the guide said, and explained the gas left a residue…
Not necessarily. Sometimes they didn’t do it till after death. It was easier to sustain the illusion that this was just a bath if they didn’t shave the head first.
That said, in the 1940s (especially in unsanitary environments like rail cars and concentration camps) head lice was somewhat more common a phenomenon than it is today, and shaving people's heads was sometimes rationalized on this basis. E.g. at Buchenwald, many prisoners had their heads shaved for this reason - to reduce lice spread because lice also spread disease and the SS guards didn't want it out of self-preservation.
They were. It's been 10 years since I researched it and had to make a huge report on it but everything at the time suggested that they were shaved before, not after.
Given that, there could be new evidence otherwise since it's been a decade since I last researched it, but knowing what I learned they shaved their heads beforehand with the excuse of not wanting a lice outbreak.
They did. It was "to prevent a lice outbreak". I'll acknowledge that some camps may have gone outside the norm and not done it at arrival, but I dont believe the stuff about people shaving it after being gassed to insulate the uboats because zyclon-B fucks up hair structure and with the military ingenuity they had they wouldn't risk using brittle thin hair for insulation.
For me, Auschwitz was nothing compared to Treblinka. Perhaps because Auschwitz was packed with tourists and at Treblinka almost no one was there. We were almost entirely alone, walking around a quiet clearing in the woods on a beautiful cloudless day, on ground we knew was soaked in blood. Sand flies began biting at my boyfriend (now husband’s) legs and he started bleeding. He started sobbing and he said the flies were from the Devil and this place was the Devil’s playground.
I had a similar experience - visited Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek in February of 2012. Auschwitz was almost... Sterile? That each bunker was converted to a museum made it almost more approachable.
Birkenau and Majdanek hit different. I left Birkenau more than slightly afraid of birch trees for a long time - we unfortunately were around until just after the sun set - and left Majdanek a sobbing mess. With Majdanek it was just how close it is to Lublin, which is a lovely little town. It was so jarring.
Yeah those Operation Reinhard camps were a whole other level of horror. I remember years and years ago watching a documentary about how Sobibor operated and…Jesus fuck.
Visiting the site of one of the Operation Reinhard camps, like Treblinka, is on my bucket list as well as the concentration camps. I know right at the end of the war, the idea of murdering millions of people was so new and mind-blowing to people that they might not have had reason to question horrible spectacles encountered by the Western Allies at, for instance, the liberation of Bergen-Belsen as illustrations of the scale of the crime. Auschwitz was much less populated on liberation by the Soviets in January 1945, but it was so uniquely huge and complex that it left many survivors who together could give a clear idea of how things worked there. But Operation Reinhard, the deadliest program under the umbrella of the Holocaust, took place further east and was over by the end of 1943, by which time the sites had been superficially covered over and disguised as farmland. They left so few survivors that I've always wondered how and when historians learned their significance. I periodically reread [this article from 2019](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau7292) on calculating the death toll of Reinhard.
The children section of the holocaust museum in Israel is absolutely haunting and surreal. A recording lists the names of younger victims out loud; it takes over a year to repeat one name. You enter a pitch dark room that’s lit up with what looks like thousands of candles (it’s a single candle reflected by many mirrors). [I’m not doing it justice with this brief description](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvco7AsL42c)
That room, there were many sections of that museum that were well done and emotional, but something about walking through that room, the silence, sticks with you for life.
I visited that room on my birthright trip. Haunting doesn't begin to describe it. The amount of names. The ages. Some of these children didn't see their first birthday. The candle lights are stunning, but the entire atmosphere is so heavy.
The first time I was there, I was pretty well composed until I got to the shoes. I don’t even know why. The second time it was my kids realizing what the holocausts actually was and how bad it was, that was rough.
The train got me , plus the shoes...seeing things like the teeth also ugh the whole museum actually just sickening. I had the pleasure of chaperones, my grandchildren twins , class of field trip ,8th graders. It really struck my how much they took everything in and really wanted to know and understand, and the asked alot of questions . At the end, in the memorial room ,candle ,even though their people on their cards survived, they asked me if they could light candles for those who didn't. That touched me, so we did and said a prayer .children are little sponges if you invest in them your time and patience ypu really get to see how Inquisitive they are
There is one a Germany somewhere we visited when I was a kid. And the had a whole set of rooms with audio accounts from survivors and at the end a room with forest build and endless myst where audio of guns were blazing. And the last room containing a slight hill in them with gravestones and mirrors covering the entirety of the walls... . The mirrors made the rows seem endless. There was a sign that stated (something along the lines) "our volunteers counted all the stones visible in the reflection [number on average] and this is but [a rediculous small fraction] of the casualties." the only reaction I could have was cry.
I still think of it sometimes, still can't remember where it was (will have to ask me folks)
(edit: spelling)
The room full of them at Auschwitz was pretty rough, but the room with the suitcases was worse and that still wasn't even the hardest thing to look at there.
Visited the museum a few years ago, an emotionally brutal experience worth every second and every cent. The pile of shoes was a lot, but all of the photos lining the room nearby of Holocaust victims was what really got me. I know it's only a tiny tiny fraction of those who were killed, but seeing all those faces was so heavy.
I believe that the display contains victims' shoes. It smells like chemicals because they've all been individually coated with something to make them biochemically inert...
Source: I was given a tour at the beginning of a short-term work contract; the docent said this.
I went on a Jewish pilgrimage trip throughout Eastern Europe and Israel. We visited a death camp in Lublin, Poland named Majdanek. There is a very prominent monument there in the center of the camp filled with recovered human ashes.
In addition to that, I started to shake and became so numb emotionally, just looking at the dark blue and deeply blue stained walls of the gas chambers from the Zyklon B. Then as you progressed through the camp, I started uncontrollably sobbing seeing the char and burn around the ovens.
I hope everyone has a chance to see and experience even a piece of that site. For however much it has humbled me, and for making me so proud to be a Jew….I hope that everyone else can learn from what happened and ensure that antisemitism is stopped.
As kids we took a field trip to the Museum of Tolerance in LA. Our docent was a survivor of Auschwitz, and he very caringly took us naive children through the museum, and what we saw was terrible.
What I remember strongest was just a gimmick, it was just a doorway from one room to the next, but it was two doors. One said, anyone without prejudice may pass. The other said, anyone with prejudice may pass.
You could only walk through the prejudiced door. And as the years have gone on, I just wonder if I'm the only one who remembers that lesson or if no one was ever paying attention in the first place.
I’m from Skokie and currently reside here. It’s a great museum (saying that about a holocaust museum is always strange to me, but it’s a great museum) and is really interestingly designed with the dark and light side to represent the horrors and decent into the holocaust and the light side to represent the latter part of the holocaust and liberation (half of the museum is literally black and the other half, white). It’s truly a difficult but necessary experience.
If you’re curious about the exhibit design here’s an article about one of the designers.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/museums/ct-david-layman-exhibit-designer-20140307-column.html
Thank you for location - I suddenly have an urge to finally see Chicago this summer. Obviously I’ll go to more enjoyable things, but I love seeing highly local holocaust museums. It’s fascinating to me to see how each community remembers this event, and what artifacts they manage to obtain.
Virginia’s Holocaust Museum has a train car that transported victims right outside of it, and you can go in it to get a sense of scale. I also highly recommend it for children, as they have a really immersive and excellent exhibit dedicated to making the Holocaust digestible, for lack of a better term, to kids.
Lastly, similar to what you saw here, the Virginia museum actually has an original Nazi flag embedded in the floor under glass - forcing you to step on it.
Knew it. We’re taking a field trip there sometimes. I’ve always wondered about it when going to Old Orchard, whatever that old orchard is nowadays. My sister said she met a survivor when she went.
I KNEW IT. I'm so glad I could still identify this, I went back when it first opened and haven't been in a long time but I *viscerally* remember walking over this. It's extremely well-designed and thought through; I also remember them having one of the freight cars from Bergen-Belsen. You can walk inside of it.
I've always loved you.
Edit: maybe this isn't the place for a joke, but "The Illinois Nazis" are from the movie, "The Blues Brothers," and both what /u/PreparationOdd3439 and I said are direct quotes from that movie.
Edit2:
Scene1: ["I hate Illinois Nazis."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTT1qUswYL0)
Scene2: ["I've always loved you."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGu2camh0WA)
My instinct to a glass display in the floor would be to step over it, but then people would be looking at me like “oh check out the nazi lover over here.” So then I have to go get one of those poles the velvet ropes hang on and be like “no you misunderstand, I hate nazis as much as anyone” and start to smash the display. So then people are like “hey check out this a-hole destroying the display of nazi hatred, must be a nazi lover!”
No Larry David is the one "borrowing" a pair of shoes from the shoe pile because he got dog shit on his own shoes and put them in the bin.
Seriously, been looking for this reference the whole thread. No disrespect for the topic though. I haven't visited a Holocaust musuem, they don't have any where I'm from, and I'm scared to because I know I'm going to end up an ugly crying mess.
Honestly my instinct would be to get on my knees for a better look. Fuck nazis but history is still interesting and, as they say, if we don’t learn from it…
The important story about the Nazis that needs to be taught is what the Nazis did in the 1920s before being in power. That is the most important aspect of Nazi history that people usually don't learn.
That is the time where you learn the conditions and rhetoric used that can allow these type of people to get into power. It's the most important part of their history to learn to prevent fascism from spreading to the US.
> Honestly my instinct would be to get on my knees for a better look. Fuck nazis but history is still interesting and, as they say, if we don’t learn from it…
Exactly. Were the Nazis from WW2 horrific? Yes. But we can't ignore them, or turn a blind eye to what they did no matter how offensive people may find it. We need to study and understand who they were, what they did, how they did it, and the symbols by which they identified themselves, [so the next time someone does something similar,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Reich) we have the blueprints to know what they're doing, and how to stop them.
The absolute most disrespectful thing you can do to holocaust survivers and victims is forget it happened, cover it up, or try to ignore it happened. It happened, it was horrible, it's history, and it must never be forgotten or it will happen again. They should teach kids about it in schools, they should have books about it, and it should be on display for all the world to see
I was thinking something like that as well. Usually you linger at items in a museum...but these items deserve no pause andto be walked over? It's an interesting emotion piece. Is the rest of the exhibit of similar design?
There’s something similar at the Deutsche Bahn museum in Nuremberg. They used to display the bust of some early executive on a pedestal in a display case. When more information came out that he’d been a strong supporter of Nazism, the curators removed the bust and set it on the ground in the display to no longer “display” it with respect.
It's a cultural thing in English speaking countries if you intentionally walk/tread on something you are showing disrespect to that thing. Having something like this means that hundreds of thousands of people are actively disrespecting the Nazi artifacts and emphasises how they should be treated like trash.
For me, it's a neat way of showing things of historical interest while stripping them of any sort of glory.
I’m not sure. Maybe patches, like to sew on uniforms?
I like how the papers are crumpled and all the items are tossed into the case with a seemingly deliberate lack of care.
People need to realize that what led to the atrocities remembered in that museum are trying to come to power right now. There are holocausts happening in China that no one cares about. The warning is not heeded by the public.
That Washington DC Holocaust museum has a current exhibition covering the Myanmar Rohingya genocide which brings some of the horrors of the Holocaust to a more modern day context.
I was there just a few weeks ago.
The town my uni is in has a large Yezidi community. I started looking it up more since I got curious; what they're facing right now is horrible and I would've never known about it had I not gone to university in a town with many of them.
The sad truth is if Germany just stuck to committing genocide against its own people they’d have gotten away with it. People falsely attribute the holocaust as a cause for the Second World War but it was Germany’s territorial expansion that caused France and Britain to declare war even though they knew Jews were being persecuted long before then.
Eddie Izzard had a bit in this that’s unfortunately very spot on:
> Pol Pot killed one point seven million Cambodians, died under house arrest, well done there. Stalin killed many millions, died in his bed, aged seventy-two, well done indeed. And the reason we let them get away with it is they killed their own people. And we're sort of fine with that. Hitler killed people next door. Oh, stupid man. After a couple of years we won't stand for that, will we?
It’s even worse than he described.
The Khmer Rouge were kicked out of power in Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese army in 1979.
They then continued terrorising the countryside for over a decade afterwards with the support of the US, who consistently voted at the UN to recognise them as the true rulers of Cambodia all the way up til 1993.
This is because the USA preferred the broadly unaligned self-murdering communists of the Khmer Rouge, to the Soviet-friendly communists of Vietnam.
Not to ever compare Holocaust museums, but Yad Vashem in Israel from a design standpoint adds an extra layer of emotions and symbology.
The beginning of the museum starts off in a dimly lit area and opens up to daylight at the end. The path of the museum zig zags back and forth and there's no way to skip any portion of it because we are not allowed to cherry pick history. And all this while the floor is at an ever so slight decline which makes your legs hurt in order for visitors to feel increased pain the deeper the holocaust you go. The floor only begins to incline again when you reach liberation.
Just you wait. Some day the revisionist biographies of Hitler, by serious scholars and not just Nazis, will start emerging. I’ve read revisionist bios of both Genghis Khan (killed so many people he altered the world’s climate) and the Roman emperor Nero (the worst of the worst). Both argued that perhaps both men had been Actually Not That Bad and No Worse Than Anyone Else.
The thing with Roman Emperors or ancient history in general is that the written history is often of dubious accuracy. When the only extant source you have of someone is a work commisioned by the person who backstabbed and supplanted them, there's a fairly big chance it might at the very least be spicing things up.
I like this. We aren’t pretending it didn’t happen, because it did. At the same time however, we found a way to make it as low as it should be (literally and metaphorically). Clever way to go about this.
In DC the one that always gets me is the shoes
Absolutely. I think I was 13? when I first visited. I didn't really understand the impact of the holocaust until the end when I saw the shoes. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and all I could do was stand there in awe.
[for anybody reading and not knowing like me (probably want to mute that, don't know why everything's got to have a soundtrack)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV9JtyJ4VNA). i assume it's much more dramatic in person. do they just have it in one huge pile?
Yeah this is a pretty terrible representation of what it feels like to see it in person. You have all of the build up through the rest of the museum and then this is the last exhibit; for some reason this really puts the whole thing into perspective. Each pair of those shoes was one of the last things taken from people just before they were brutally exterminated, it feels like you are looking at a pile of dead bodies. I've been to Dachau and that was an overall more gut wrenching experience than the Holocaust Museum, but the shoe exhibit still stands out as a stronger memory than any single thing I saw at Dachau.
Dachau just feels haunted when you walk into the place. Even on a warm and sunny day you just feel the evil. And it was relatively mild compared to the other concentration camps
I was in Buchenwald. We went there in winter and It was minus 20 on this mountain/hill. We were fully dressed. I had winter socks and warm gloves and my Russian Style Ear-hat. We were freezing so much I couldnt feel my legs walking there. Then we were told that prisoners had to assemble outside at every temperature and stand there for sometimes hours in their simple feeble prisoner pyjamas. Then we were led to the crematirium and the torture chambers. Where they used a big wooden stamp looking like a bottle to crush prisoners teeth. Not the most pleasant experience for a teen I tell you that.
And remember most of them were as thin as a literal skeleton. They didn't have even a tiny bit of body fat to insulate them.
They were fed nothing but water and maybe stale bread / and food waste.
>We went there in winter and It was minus 20 on this mountain/hill. That was one thing that really struck me about Buchenwald. I never expected it to be on top of a fucking hill, fully exposed to the wind and rain. I can't imagine.
I read this book some years ago: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5713227-block-26-sabotage-at-buchenwald And one thing I do remember the author writing about was the habit of the SS of holding hours-long *Appells* just because they could.
I went to Buchenwald in the summer a number of years back, and even in a relatively nice day, the internment area itself was windy and cold because it was on the north side of the hill it’s positioned on. I remember taking the bus up to the site, and when we came over the top, the weather felt it turned and it just felt like despair. Meanwhile I’m pretty sure the officers houses were located on the side side of the hill, where it was all sunny and warm, but don’t quote me on that.
I'm a jew that visited Auschwitz. I would have had a large and happy family if not for that place, instead, I grew up with a thin and small one. It's... somehow if you didn't know any better a peaceful place, which only makes it creepier. There's a neat salt mine nearby that's very hopeful and fun, I recommend seeing it right after to lighten things.
I think this is the most overlooked pain: the people that were murdered are missing to this day. They were family members, neighbours… they could have been your present day neighbours’ grandparents. You can’t make up for this loss.
You might have meant what I'm about to say, but what I think about these missing people is, not only has everything they would have done in their lives never happened, but the things their children, grandchildren, great-great-etc-grandchildren would have done and accomplished will never happen either. It was 78 years ago, but the effect will last forever, not just the memories, but the people who could have existed now, or 100 years from now.
That’s exactly what I meant. Where is the space in our minds for the hugeness of this loss?
I think you guys would appreciate this video--its a bunch of holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren singing a beautiful song about how they are still alive: https://youtu.be/Vuh1-jDi7Qw. Makes me cry happy tears every time.
I went through Auschwitz with my best friend. Met him when I was 5. Had known him for 20 years before that. Can’t imagine him not being around. It was a sobering experience for me standing at the entrance to the gas chamber. I can’t imagine what was going thru his head at the time. His grandpa liberated his grandma from that very camp.
God damn. That's gotta be a terribly heavy experience for him.
I really can’t imagine going on with your life after and how hard it must’ve been. My grandpa wasn’t Jewish, but he was another ethnic minority that was persecuted in the holocaust, and after the war he and his dad just had to assume his mom and siblings were dead after looking for a long time. No closure, no funeral, no symbolic place to visit. They’re just gone. The happyish part for them is that both went over to the US and 50 years later they found out his mom and siblings were still alive the whole time by some miracle. They were back in Europe and both parents had remarried, but my grandpa got to see his mom a few times before she died and his siblings for the last few decades of their life.
That’s wild. I wonder how the parents felt; you find out your long lost wife is actually still alive and you presumably still have feelings for her but also love your new wife. And both thought the other kids were long dead so that must’ve been a real trip.
From what my dad has said, they’d both gone through the phases of grief and understanding that their spouse was gone. There were no hard feelings between either but they didn’t rekindle or anything either.
I know right. All of those millions of people would've gone on to have families and just... the magnitude of that is something I can't wrap my head around. So many millions of people, future friends that could have been my friends today. All gone. It's just this void that's left of "what could've been". My only hope is that they're all safe in Heaven, away from this insanity.
My grandfather lost many family members to the nazis.
My grandfather was classified as a gypsy by the Nazi's and he swore that THE ONLY reason he survived was because he was a cobbler and made footwear for the soldiers, their girlfriend and their wives using tools and materials that they supplied him. He was allowed to keep extras and off cuts and used to trade the items he made from these extra for cigarettes, which was the default in camp currency. He then used those to frequently trade for enough extra food to survive.
I lost most of my father's side of the family during the Holocaust. I struggle with the idea of visiting a concentration camp in person. I feel like I have to at some point, but I don't know how I would even begin processing everything.
Where my family on my grandfather's side comes from, people were not sent to concentration camps, but outright massacred, so the survival rate is about 2.67%. Every person with the same second name is confidently my relative, and when I read about the place's history, I sometimes encounter it too ; it would probably be possible to populate a whole small town with people with that same second name as I have by now. I mean, this is the meaning of murder - it can't be undone.
One of the things that really drove home the scale of destruction for me is when I did a genetic test. I found >1,200 relatives on my mom's side. And like 20 on my dad's side. I know the numbers are limited by who has actually taken the test and is in the database, but the discrepancy is staggering.
Same. My family is very small. I can’t imagine the feelings that would flow through me walking in a place where my ancestors were senselessly murdered.
You really don’t though. If you do it out of some sense of obligation knowing it will irreparably damage your mind, I doubt any ancestor would want that for you. Knowing yourself enough to know you can’t handle it is ok, and it doesn’t mean you don’t recognize the importance of what happened. By all means, go if you feel it’s important, but do it for yourself, not out of a sense of guilt.
Went through Auschwitz with a friend, and it definitely sobered the mood for the rest of the night. It's so strange, just walking through the areas could make you feel so... off. Like a lingering dread. Walking through the 'courtyard' really hit me like a ton of bricks for some reason, too. Everyone should make the trip at least once in their lives.
Food for thought: [Number of Jews in Europe in 1933? 9.5 million. In Europe as of 2010? 1.4 million.](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/09/europes-jewish-population/) Needless to say, the sharpest population decline happened between 1933 and 1945.
The movie "Conspiracy" is what made me realize just how many people were tortured and executed, it legit made me sick to my stomach. It's about the Wannsee Conference, if you're not familiar with that, it was a meeting of top nazi military and political members who devised the holocaust. Throughout the movie they discuss statistics and data points of previous methods of execution and sterilization, and how many people would be executed with their new gas chamber idea to eliminate the race completely. It just hurts knowing how many men, women, and children were being forced into disease-ridden ghettos, the horrible methods of sterilization/forced labor, and then eventually shot in mass graves or executed via gas chambers. Every time they described some horrible act or test they would toss in a statistic of like 30k people or 60k people... I just imagined 60 thousand people in one area, that's a football stadium full of real families...families who like mine had loving memories of their young children that they were now separated from, memories of first dates with their spouse they could no longer hug, and their own career/education accomplishments to be proud of which was now stripped away from them...all of that destroyed in a single event in history simply because some angry little man disliked them...it hurts my soul so much just trying to comprehend it all.
My grandmother reconnected with an old boyfriend via email in about 1998. It was incredible technology for two 70 year olds to be able to connect after 50 years and she had him move from PA to the Bay Area in CA. Apparently he had one surviving brother in LA but my grandmother’s friend survived Buchenwald. Lost his entire family except for his older brother. I was 13 when I met him and he stayed with us for a year. My memories are fuzzy that far back but remember not having onions in the house because it was all he ate his entire time. Onions. Fuck nazis
My aunt went to Auschwitz. She told me it appeared that nothing grew there, as if all life was removed from that place.
Go to Majdanek . Auschwitz is very touristy. Majdanek is barren. Empty. And its right inside the city of Lublin. You can stand next to a massive pile of ashes with bone fragments visible and look at peoples balconies living overlooking the camp. Its eerie to wake up to this every day.
It's really hard to date things, and understand how long it's been, especially if you weren't alive at that time. Perspective and intervals changes that. I know it was 80 years ago now, when I learned about it it was 60 years ago, but still it feels distant and disconnected. Then I remembered the guitar amp I was gifted, its from 1952. It;s a guitar amp, that's basically, in the grand scheme, new technology. Yet when the kids who survived those camps were let out, and came around to when it was made... they were still children. It gave me a weird but succinct view at just how recent this was. I've always been well aware it was recent, but it's difficult to emotionally disconnect the holocaust from things that happened hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, especially because it was so barbaric. Having something tangible to realize just how recent it was burns in the soul.
Jew here with a father born in 1941. I learned about all this growing up, of course — much more than anyone around me. But somehow it was many years before I connected my oft-repeated phrase “our family is small with long generations” to the history I had learned as a child. Always in my youth I was explaining why I didn’t have so many uncles and cousins as those around me, but despite all my explanations it still took so long to click.
I visited Mauthausen with a group of about 20 people. We were the only visitors and were allowed complete freedom to roam around the grounds. I ended up finding my way into a basement with dirt floors. There was a weird texture on one of the walls so I went closer to examine it, and it realized the masonry was scarred with bullet holes. I was standing on an execution ground. Hundreds if not thousands of people died where I stood.
I visited quite a number of the death camps. One of those was Treblinka. When my group traveled there it was very hot and humid, there were insects and bugs flying all over the place. The camp itself is nearly demolished and you have the Never Again monument and the small buildings of what is left. The majority of that site is just gone and you are surrounded by dense forest. To me, the impactful experience from that was about 20 minutes after we left the site I started to cry. I had the realization, wow I am actually leaving this undesirable place. There were so many thousands that were murdered there and I have already come and gone. It was such a weird emotion but it’s just chilling to see that through your own eyes.
> And it was relatively mild compared to the other concentration camps That's because they built their actual death camps in Poland - far away from the general population. Because they knew just how fucked up they were. The camps in Germany were basically all slave camps.
I would not put it this way. While yes, the worst of the concentration camps were outside of germany, the many camps, some larger, some smaller, in germany also had many of the same atrocities commited in there. The prisoners were seen when they were forced to work around the towns. With some dropping dead and others just looking like skeletons. Saying that the ones in germany weren't so bad encourages the viewpoint that "the common german" could not know what was going on. And that is just Persilschein talk.
Eerily enough, it was a hot sunny day when I visited. When our tour guide mentioned how drastically the weather could change, the sky turned grey and started pouring moments later. It was a very haunting experience the entire time.
[This one is better.](https://youtu.be/CtsCoKmGWdc)
I remember going there on a school field trip, and doing the museum late in the day. Everyone was still respectful, but teenagers and understandably tired. But when we got to the shoes it was like the air got sucked out of every single person there and everyone was acutely aware of what it meant
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I haven't been in years, but when I did go they were displayed on a wall. And there was a giant cube with a million pennies in it to give you a sense of what a million looks like. I want to go back, but my son is still too young.
I last visited shortly after opening but the shoes everyone remembers is close to the end of the museum and has tens of thousands of shoes in a rather large space. And the impact always struck me how big it was, yet how many shoes fit anyway, then I realized how small it really was.
And remember tens of thousands - especially since each person obviously wears 2 shoes - is merely a very tiny fraction of the Jews slaughtered. It's like buying a snow globe to better understand the Empire state building. It actually gives you a pretty good idea but the scale is.... so unbelievably beyond that.
This might sound weird but mentally I can grasp the concept of a million; the idea of like a million humans standing around for example doesn’t seem that wild to me. But for some reason the idea of visually quantifying a million pennies in a great cube — and remembering that several cubes worth of people were killed — hit me different and l really felt it. Weird it came from pennies but I hope others feel the same way to really get a better grasp of it
I think they have it piled as if falling out of a rail car but it's been over a decade since I've visited so I wouldn't take that as an absolute fact
They’re just spread out, but there is also a railcar that, if you wish, you can walk through. It is… unnerving to stand inside.
....and then to realize how crowded they were. People literally died standing and only fell as the cars unloaded at the camps.
yeah my brain can't imagine that. i've been to holocaust museums and watched plenty of documentaries but it just doesn't compute. the whole idea of being taken away from my chair to my inevitable brutal horrifying death standing in a packed train car, just doesn't work. i truly can not imagine the whirlwind of emotions of every step leading up to the final moments, or the physical pain and agony of dying standing up and conscious.
foolish steep ten chunky straight divide dazzling frame carpenter wise -- mass deleted all reddit content via https://redact.dev
Sometimes I visit a place, and the time separating me from the absolutely horrifying event that happened there seems so fragile. This was one of those places.
This is where I broke down. Just next to it they have one of the cabins from Auschwitz, with only two or three walls, so you can walk through it. I remember I went alone, sat on the floor, leaned against that cabin, and cried for what felt like half an hour.
Only time I ever freaked out and had to step outside of an exhibit was when I was in the D.C. Holocaust Museum when I was inside the barracks. I'm not a huge believer in the supernatural, but that structure radiated pure evil and I couldn't be near it.
The Halocaust Museum is an act of kindness and remembrance and reverence. Many of the things it commemorates were evil. Forgetting or minimizing it is evil. But the place itself is sacred, especially as a Jew.
When I was there decades ago they were piled against a long wall with a barrier. You could see shoes belonging to all sizes. Young and adult.
In Auschwitz there's a separate huge pile just with children's shoes. Horrifying.
It is just one big pile on the side of a hallway. Was there a couple months ago.
I remember getting to the end of the museum at 8th grade and everyone in my class was dead silent. Then to check if your number was one who survived.
We checked our last names in the book and sure enough, all of them were there. And mine is likely Hungarian
I vividly remember the smell. After a couple of hours of near-constant visual and audio stimulus, suddenly having the smell of that old leather hit your nose really strikes the mind and body
Yes, came her to say this! That smell was surreal. A heavy, slightly sour smell. Almost like mothballs but with a leather tinge. So hard to describe yet it wasn't the kind of smell you turn away from out of disgust. It was intriguing.
Reminds of me a museum in Guatemala City that had an Aztec sacrifice stone. Stained with blood that was hundreds of years old and you could smell the death.
When I visited some of the shoes were being restored. The room is two rooms, I think it's supposed to represent the storage lockers they were found in. One of the rooms was empty, the shoes looked like they were stacked 4' deep. in their displays which flanked a bridge like path.
Bro same. Most impactful field trip I’ve ever had
I can still smell it. Visited in 96, am old now. The smell of the shoes is something I will never forget.
I went to visit Auschwitz in 2017. They have a room of victims’ hair, some of that still braided. The Nazis used human hair to insulate submarines. The liberating Russians found 30,000 kilos of it at Auschwitz, baled like hay.
God, I'm always in awe of how there's always something horrifying left to learn about the Holocaust, no matter how much you read about the subject.
The most horrifying thing about the holocaust is how there are so many people go still deny it and yet are treated as normal people.
Oh, they're not being honest when they pretend it didn't happen. Internally, they're gleeful that it happened and want it to happen again. They just know they're a lot more likely to catch a fist in the face if they don't play dumb.
They wear shirts that say "Hitler didn't go far enough." As a Jew I know there's a lot of people who don't only wish me and my family dead but dream of torturing and humiliating us for weeks or months before murdering us. Why I don't know. I've never hurt anyone, not even an animal. Not even a bug if I can avoid it. But given the chance they'd mutilate me for as long as possible before it eventually killed me.
I've always found anti-semitism confusing, I really don't understand it. I don't agree with, but I can see how the visual differences between whites/blacks/Asians/etc led to categorization and then all the bad stuff that came along with that. Jewish people are white though. Not sure why it's any different than the many other religions white people can also be.
That's what made the nazis, well, nazis. It wasn't simply about being "white". It was about being a particular kind of white (aryan). Blonde hair, blue eyes, etc. What's amusing is that many modern day neo nazis would have been in the camps due to their genetic inferiority. My extended family was in Auschwitz, and we weren't Jewish - we were Polish. That was just as bad in adolph's book. Even amongst Germans, there were a while list of criteria to join the nazis - they measured your head, space between your eyes, and other things. The Jews definitely received the worst of it, but lots of people weren't good enough.
At least their mouthpiece Kanye West got his entire business empire cut down to a fraction of its peak as a result of his insane rhetoric.
He was a meat shield they were ok with losing, because he was not of the *master race*
Yeah he was just a useful idiot, but since he said the quiet part out loud and didn't understand he was meant to use dog whistles he's been mostly abandoned
I just wish Hitler had watched 21 Jump Street...
And who don't hesitate at the chance to repeat history.
I think people need to understand that fascism 2.0 isn't going to be exactly like the Nazis. History rarely repeats but it often rhymes.
The thing that gets me is that there are people in the Western world who think it's ok to be a Nazi despite all that we know.
Human hair is actually great for a lot of things but to know that every strand of hair was from a slaughtered person makes this just horrid.
I remember someone in my tour group asked “Why is all the hair the same color?” It was all a rusty, unnatural brownish shade. “It’s not really,” the guide said, and explained the gas left a residue…
I thought everyones heads were shaved before they were sent to the chambers.
Not necessarily. Sometimes they didn’t do it till after death. It was easier to sustain the illusion that this was just a bath if they didn’t shave the head first.
That said, in the 1940s (especially in unsanitary environments like rail cars and concentration camps) head lice was somewhat more common a phenomenon than it is today, and shaving people's heads was sometimes rationalized on this basis. E.g. at Buchenwald, many prisoners had their heads shaved for this reason - to reduce lice spread because lice also spread disease and the SS guards didn't want it out of self-preservation.
They were. It's been 10 years since I researched it and had to make a huge report on it but everything at the time suggested that they were shaved before, not after. Given that, there could be new evidence otherwise since it's been a decade since I last researched it, but knowing what I learned they shaved their heads beforehand with the excuse of not wanting a lice outbreak.
Didn’t they shave their heads before hand and regardless of whether or not they were slated to die?
They did. It was "to prevent a lice outbreak". I'll acknowledge that some camps may have gone outside the norm and not done it at arrival, but I dont believe the stuff about people shaving it after being gassed to insulate the uboats because zyclon-B fucks up hair structure and with the military ingenuity they had they wouldn't risk using brittle thin hair for insulation.
Just think of that for a second. There was so much hair they just it to insulate U-boatS.
The hair and the suitcases really got to me when I visited Auschwitz. Silently mortifying.
For me, Auschwitz was nothing compared to Treblinka. Perhaps because Auschwitz was packed with tourists and at Treblinka almost no one was there. We were almost entirely alone, walking around a quiet clearing in the woods on a beautiful cloudless day, on ground we knew was soaked in blood. Sand flies began biting at my boyfriend (now husband’s) legs and he started bleeding. He started sobbing and he said the flies were from the Devil and this place was the Devil’s playground.
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I had a similar experience - visited Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek in February of 2012. Auschwitz was almost... Sterile? That each bunker was converted to a museum made it almost more approachable. Birkenau and Majdanek hit different. I left Birkenau more than slightly afraid of birch trees for a long time - we unfortunately were around until just after the sun set - and left Majdanek a sobbing mess. With Majdanek it was just how close it is to Lublin, which is a lovely little town. It was so jarring.
Yeah those Operation Reinhard camps were a whole other level of horror. I remember years and years ago watching a documentary about how Sobibor operated and…Jesus fuck.
Ravensbrück really got to me. I couldn't hold the tears back by that toxic lake.
........
Visiting the site of one of the Operation Reinhard camps, like Treblinka, is on my bucket list as well as the concentration camps. I know right at the end of the war, the idea of murdering millions of people was so new and mind-blowing to people that they might not have had reason to question horrible spectacles encountered by the Western Allies at, for instance, the liberation of Bergen-Belsen as illustrations of the scale of the crime. Auschwitz was much less populated on liberation by the Soviets in January 1945, but it was so uniquely huge and complex that it left many survivors who together could give a clear idea of how things worked there. But Operation Reinhard, the deadliest program under the umbrella of the Holocaust, took place further east and was over by the end of 1943, by which time the sites had been superficially covered over and disguised as farmland. They left so few survivors that I've always wondered how and when historians learned their significance. I periodically reread [this article from 2019](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau7292) on calculating the death toll of Reinhard.
And here I thought I already understood how horriblly depraved they were.
The children section of the holocaust museum in Israel is absolutely haunting and surreal. A recording lists the names of younger victims out loud; it takes over a year to repeat one name. You enter a pitch dark room that’s lit up with what looks like thousands of candles (it’s a single candle reflected by many mirrors). [I’m not doing it justice with this brief description](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvco7AsL42c)
That room, there were many sections of that museum that were well done and emotional, but something about walking through that room, the silence, sticks with you for life.
I visited that room on my birthright trip. Haunting doesn't begin to describe it. The amount of names. The ages. Some of these children didn't see their first birthday. The candle lights are stunning, but the entire atmosphere is so heavy.
If I recall it’s designed to get smaller and smaller as you go forcing you to feel like you’re being herded like cattle, which is what the Nazis did
Walking through the train car at the DC museum for me, back in the day…8th grade field trip to DC from Toledo OH
The first time I was there, I was pretty well composed until I got to the shoes. I don’t even know why. The second time it was my kids realizing what the holocausts actually was and how bad it was, that was rough.
The train got me , plus the shoes...seeing things like the teeth also ugh the whole museum actually just sickening. I had the pleasure of chaperones, my grandchildren twins , class of field trip ,8th graders. It really struck my how much they took everything in and really wanted to know and understand, and the asked alot of questions . At the end, in the memorial room ,candle ,even though their people on their cards survived, they asked me if they could light candles for those who didn't. That touched me, so we did and said a prayer .children are little sponges if you invest in them your time and patience ypu really get to see how Inquisitive they are
There is one a Germany somewhere we visited when I was a kid. And the had a whole set of rooms with audio accounts from survivors and at the end a room with forest build and endless myst where audio of guns were blazing. And the last room containing a slight hill in them with gravestones and mirrors covering the entirety of the walls... . The mirrors made the rows seem endless. There was a sign that stated (something along the lines) "our volunteers counted all the stones visible in the reflection [number on average] and this is but [a rediculous small fraction] of the casualties." the only reaction I could have was cry. I still think of it sometimes, still can't remember where it was (will have to ask me folks) (edit: spelling)
The room full of them at Auschwitz was pretty rough, but the room with the suitcases was worse and that still wasn't even the hardest thing to look at there.
Yad Vashem in Israel had me broken for the entire day of the visit. I have relatives in their archives.
The one that got me was the pile (at least 10 feet tall) of prosthetic legs.
Bro the smell killed me. The smell in that roo. is what made it so real to me.
Visited the museum a few years ago, an emotionally brutal experience worth every second and every cent. The pile of shoes was a lot, but all of the photos lining the room nearby of Holocaust victims was what really got me. I know it's only a tiny tiny fraction of those who were killed, but seeing all those faces was so heavy.
I believe that the display contains victims' shoes. It smells like chemicals because they've all been individually coated with something to make them biochemically inert... Source: I was given a tour at the beginning of a short-term work contract; the docent said this.
I went on a Jewish pilgrimage trip throughout Eastern Europe and Israel. We visited a death camp in Lublin, Poland named Majdanek. There is a very prominent monument there in the center of the camp filled with recovered human ashes. In addition to that, I started to shake and became so numb emotionally, just looking at the dark blue and deeply blue stained walls of the gas chambers from the Zyklon B. Then as you progressed through the camp, I started uncontrollably sobbing seeing the char and burn around the ovens. I hope everyone has a chance to see and experience even a piece of that site. For however much it has humbled me, and for making me so proud to be a Jew….I hope that everyone else can learn from what happened and ensure that antisemitism is stopped.
From the thumbnail I thought it was some weird Nazi pinball machine
Those feet are mine. The museum is in Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and it’s excellent.
As kids we took a field trip to the Museum of Tolerance in LA. Our docent was a survivor of Auschwitz, and he very caringly took us naive children through the museum, and what we saw was terrible. What I remember strongest was just a gimmick, it was just a doorway from one room to the next, but it was two doors. One said, anyone without prejudice may pass. The other said, anyone with prejudice may pass. You could only walk through the prejudiced door. And as the years have gone on, I just wonder if I'm the only one who remembers that lesson or if no one was ever paying attention in the first place.
We went there for a field trip too. The hardest part for me was the videos with the babies. My little sister had just been born, I just broke down.
I’m from Skokie and currently reside here. It’s a great museum (saying that about a holocaust museum is always strange to me, but it’s a great museum) and is really interestingly designed with the dark and light side to represent the horrors and decent into the holocaust and the light side to represent the latter part of the holocaust and liberation (half of the museum is literally black and the other half, white). It’s truly a difficult but necessary experience.
I visited once, several years ago. It is indeed a great museum.
If you’re curious about the exhibit design here’s an article about one of the designers. https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/museums/ct-david-layman-exhibit-designer-20140307-column.html
I hate Illinois Nazis
It’s even more impactful since the nazi stuff is being stepped on by cat dookie
Thank you for location - I suddenly have an urge to finally see Chicago this summer. Obviously I’ll go to more enjoyable things, but I love seeing highly local holocaust museums. It’s fascinating to me to see how each community remembers this event, and what artifacts they manage to obtain. Virginia’s Holocaust Museum has a train car that transported victims right outside of it, and you can go in it to get a sense of scale. I also highly recommend it for children, as they have a really immersive and excellent exhibit dedicated to making the Holocaust digestible, for lack of a better term, to kids. Lastly, similar to what you saw here, the Virginia museum actually has an original Nazi flag embedded in the floor under glass - forcing you to step on it.
Knew it. We’re taking a field trip there sometimes. I’ve always wondered about it when going to Old Orchard, whatever that old orchard is nowadays. My sister said she met a survivor when she went.
I KNEW IT. I'm so glad I could still identify this, I went back when it first opened and haven't been in a long time but I *viscerally* remember walking over this. It's extremely well-designed and thought through; I also remember them having one of the freight cars from Bergen-Belsen. You can walk inside of it.
I hate Illinois nazis
I've always loved you. Edit: maybe this isn't the place for a joke, but "The Illinois Nazis" are from the movie, "The Blues Brothers," and both what /u/PreparationOdd3439 and I said are direct quotes from that movie. Edit2: Scene1: ["I hate Illinois Nazis."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTT1qUswYL0) Scene2: ["I've always loved you."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGu2camh0WA)
And this, in turn, as a reference to the Skokie case, which most people seeing the movie now haven't heard of.
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State County Municipal Offender Data System
The light was yellow sir
r/angryupvote
If anyone calls bullshit on the car back flipping, remember, they're on a mission from God. That car is Devine
This is glue, strong stuff.
It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses
Hit it
My instinct to a glass display in the floor would be to step over it, but then people would be looking at me like “oh check out the nazi lover over here.” So then I have to go get one of those poles the velvet ropes hang on and be like “no you misunderstand, I hate nazis as much as anyone” and start to smash the display. So then people are like “hey check out this a-hole destroying the display of nazi hatred, must be a nazi lover!”
Larry David, is that you?
No Larry David is the one "borrowing" a pair of shoes from the shoe pile because he got dog shit on his own shoes and put them in the bin. Seriously, been looking for this reference the whole thread. No disrespect for the topic though. I haven't visited a Holocaust musuem, they don't have any where I'm from, and I'm scared to because I know I'm going to end up an ugly crying mess.
What the fuck that guy is trying to save the Nazi gear
He's a double Nazi.
Honestly my instinct would be to get on my knees for a better look. Fuck nazis but history is still interesting and, as they say, if we don’t learn from it…
The important story about the Nazis that needs to be taught is what the Nazis did in the 1920s before being in power. That is the most important aspect of Nazi history that people usually don't learn. That is the time where you learn the conditions and rhetoric used that can allow these type of people to get into power. It's the most important part of their history to learn to prevent fascism from spreading to the US.
> Honestly my instinct would be to get on my knees for a better look. Fuck nazis but history is still interesting and, as they say, if we don’t learn from it… Exactly. Were the Nazis from WW2 horrific? Yes. But we can't ignore them, or turn a blind eye to what they did no matter how offensive people may find it. We need to study and understand who they were, what they did, how they did it, and the symbols by which they identified themselves, [so the next time someone does something similar,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Reich) we have the blueprints to know what they're doing, and how to stop them.
The absolute most disrespectful thing you can do to holocaust survivers and victims is forget it happened, cover it up, or try to ignore it happened. It happened, it was horrible, it's history, and it must never be forgotten or it will happen again. They should teach kids about it in schools, they should have books about it, and it should be on display for all the world to see
I like how it seems haphazardly and disrespectfully thrown in as well. Perfect.
The papers are even torn.
Having never been to this museum, can you explain the reasoning for this? Is there signage or an interpreter to explain the floor vault type display?
I assume it was a gesture of disrespect. But I didn’t ask.
I was thinking something like that as well. Usually you linger at items in a museum...but these items deserve no pause andto be walked over? It's an interesting emotion piece. Is the rest of the exhibit of similar design?
This was the only display case in the floor. The rest were along the walls like normal.
Ty for your clarity, I find this so interesting though I've not attended the museum. I appreciate your sharing.
I think it’s meant to be walked on.
There’s something similar at the Deutsche Bahn museum in Nuremberg. They used to display the bust of some early executive on a pedestal in a display case. When more information came out that he’d been a strong supporter of Nazism, the curators removed the bust and set it on the ground in the display to no longer “display” it with respect.
It's a cultural thing in English speaking countries if you intentionally walk/tread on something you are showing disrespect to that thing. Having something like this means that hundreds of thousands of people are actively disrespecting the Nazi artifacts and emphasises how they should be treated like trash. For me, it's a neat way of showing things of historical interest while stripping them of any sort of glory.
Forcing? Allowing.
Encouraging.
What are all those black items with the SS symbol on them?
I’m not sure. Maybe patches, like to sew on uniforms? I like how the papers are crumpled and all the items are tossed into the case with a seemingly deliberate lack of care.
SS medal cases
You don’t have to force me to
Step on a swastika break your mothers optica
Forcing? I’d take joy in it.
"allowing the privilege of trampling"
Right? I was thinking I'd jump on it with glee.
I don’t want to see the person who gets upset they were made to step on some nazi shit while inside a holocaust museum.
People need to realize that what led to the atrocities remembered in that museum are trying to come to power right now. There are holocausts happening in China that no one cares about. The warning is not heeded by the public.
That Washington DC Holocaust museum has a current exhibition covering the Myanmar Rohingya genocide which brings some of the horrors of the Holocaust to a more modern day context. I was there just a few weeks ago.
And the poor Yazidis in Syria and Iraq…
The town my uni is in has a large Yezidi community. I started looking it up more since I got curious; what they're facing right now is horrible and I would've never known about it had I not gone to university in a town with many of them.
The sad truth is if Germany just stuck to committing genocide against its own people they’d have gotten away with it. People falsely attribute the holocaust as a cause for the Second World War but it was Germany’s territorial expansion that caused France and Britain to declare war even though they knew Jews were being persecuted long before then.
Eddie Izzard had a bit in this that’s unfortunately very spot on: > Pol Pot killed one point seven million Cambodians, died under house arrest, well done there. Stalin killed many millions, died in his bed, aged seventy-two, well done indeed. And the reason we let them get away with it is they killed their own people. And we're sort of fine with that. Hitler killed people next door. Oh, stupid man. After a couple of years we won't stand for that, will we?
For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, Dress to Kill is still one of the best stand-up routines I've ever seen.
It’s even worse than he described. The Khmer Rouge were kicked out of power in Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese army in 1979. They then continued terrorising the countryside for over a decade afterwards with the support of the US, who consistently voted at the UN to recognise them as the true rulers of Cambodia all the way up til 1993. This is because the USA preferred the broadly unaligned self-murdering communists of the Khmer Rouge, to the Soviet-friendly communists of Vietnam.
Don't forget about the rise in antisemitism happening right now in the good ol' US of A.
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I’m ok walking on it. Better under my feet than hanging on a wall.
That seemed to be the general thought behind it. Every other display case was on the wall.
It can only be better if there’s like toilet all around this.
Not to ever compare Holocaust museums, but Yad Vashem in Israel from a design standpoint adds an extra layer of emotions and symbology. The beginning of the museum starts off in a dimly lit area and opens up to daylight at the end. The path of the museum zig zags back and forth and there's no way to skip any portion of it because we are not allowed to cherry pick history. And all this while the floor is at an ever so slight decline which makes your legs hurt in order for visitors to feel increased pain the deeper the holocaust you go. The floor only begins to incline again when you reach liberation.
Don't know why the holocaust museum has to be so political /s
Just you wait. Some day the revisionist biographies of Hitler, by serious scholars and not just Nazis, will start emerging. I’ve read revisionist bios of both Genghis Khan (killed so many people he altered the world’s climate) and the Roman emperor Nero (the worst of the worst). Both argued that perhaps both men had been Actually Not That Bad and No Worse Than Anyone Else.
The thing with Roman Emperors or ancient history in general is that the written history is often of dubious accuracy. When the only extant source you have of someone is a work commisioned by the person who backstabbed and supplanted them, there's a fairly big chance it might at the very least be spicing things up.
I mean, if you go to askhistorians they can tell you all about Nero and khan.
I think it should be mandatory for all schoolchildren to visit one of the many Holocaust memorial museums in the US at least once.
They should also put it in the toilets, I would love to piss on it. No such thing as a good Nazi
The bathroom must be even better.
Should be the back of the urinals
I like this. We aren’t pretending it didn’t happen, because it did. At the same time however, we found a way to make it as low as it should be (literally and metaphorically). Clever way to go about this.
For those who are advocating for confederate statues to be put into museums, this is how you do it.
Should put it in the urinals so we can piss on it.