Originally Posted by
PTravel
First, a compliment to the Polish people and government. Auschwitz was, of course, the site of torture and murder of tens of thousands of innocent Polish citizens, along with the Jews, Roma, Russian POWs who suffered there. Poland's preservation of this monument to evil has been meticulous, and it has curated this nightmare museum with care and attention.Poland does not charge admission -- it is free for everyone to come and see.
We visited on a cold and cloudy day. The first thing that struck me was how "normal" everything looked.
-- I saw one foreign couple (I couldn't place the language) who brought two young children, girls about 7 and 9. I couldn't understand this at all. They strolled casually through the museums in the various buildings containing exhibits that were graphic and terrifying. The wandered around Block 11, the execution and punishment block, and calmly took in the unspeakable conditions in which prisoners were held, humiliated and finally put up against a wall and shot.
Good of you to write this report. My father took me and my little sister to see Auschwitz when we were in our early teens in the seventies. In Auschwitz it was a beautiful sunny day and although Poland was socialist, all was good and the concentration camp seemed unreal. I remember a small private cell with the picture of Hitler on the wall. I asked how could this be and I was told that was the cell of a Kapo. Weird memories of worlds that no longer exist.