The Horrors of Auschwitz at a Museum in New York

We saw the exhibit of the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museum. I hope to get to New York to see this. I wouldn't be able to go to Yad Vashem, I don't think I could get through it.

Meeting an Auschwitz survivor and seeing the tattoo on their arm always stops me cold. It is hard to express the joy I feel for them surviving after they were sent to a camp with one purpose and one purpose only. To make them die. I always want to hear their story. Whatever they care to share with me I am so grateful to hear. They always seem so kind and patient. Once spoke with a survivor that cared not to talk about his time there but preferred to tell me about his Miami condo. Why would I stop him? This was important to him.

I have visited most DC museums. By far, the Holocaust had the greatest impact. It was difficult to even speak during the tour and for a time after. We need to make visits to such museums mandatory for all public school children, and do so in all states. We need to hammer the lessons of the Holocaust into the minds of all Americans, including the deniers, those living in the strongholds of anti-Semitism and the alt-right maniacs. It would be difficult for the most avid hater to hold his or her views after a tour.

I spent 6 hours at Auschwitz, and last summer I spent 4 hours at Majdanek. To me, a Jew, they are "sacred" places in the sense of memorial. But in the current social and cultural climate, I question whether Holocaust memorialization is the best way to combat antisemitism. To understand the Holocaust people usually use information to underscore the depth of the atrocities. But antisemitism is not based on factual knowledge, as more recent books have observed. We see the same thing today in the U.S. where millions of people want to and *enjoy* believing in fallacious knowledge. When it's so easy to set up websites promoting Holocaust denial, when distributing and believing the long-discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion is still current, something much stronger needs to be done than having a museum exhibit devoted to the Holocaust.

Never again.

"It should never happen again", but there are hints in the air, if blatantly optimistic Americans would take notice.

I grew up in the 1950's & 1960's in a family of Polish-American heritage; my grandparents had emigrated from Poland in the early part of the 20th century. I had a Polish first cousin, once removed, who had been in the Polish army in 1939. I understood, as I grew up to an adult 'consciousness,' after the Polish army was overwhelmed, he and his fellow soldiers discarded their uniforms, rifles & fled to the UK, where they 'fought' with the British. 'Fought' is how they saw it, although the historical record seems to indicate that, while the Polish pilots flew cargo planes & the exiled Polish military certainly contributed to the war effort in the British army, as displaced persons (d.p.'s my parents termed them), it seems that the British, for good reason, didn't necessarily arm these Polish exiles, because of their concerns regarding security. Be that as it may, this cousin, at least once, when discussing the Holocaust, said something on the lines of: "Yes, the Nazis killed jews, but they also killed gypsies, the disabled, the elites and leadership of occupied countries;" the list of Nazi victims goes on. I don't know that he 'meant' to - I don't know - minimize the suffering of the jewish communities, which for centuries have been discriminated against - not a severe enough term for pograms, forced conversions, denial of living and lifelihood, and outright slaughter. But, there was certainly, in those days, an outright anti-Semitism among Europeans-and Americans, as well.

The exhibit is a welcome necessity in this country, one that I wish were more permanent than a year. In regard to the motivations for installing it, while I recognize its value given the anti-Semitic and ethnic and racist behaviors all too common in the nation, I only wish that there were as well an expansive joint body of religious, community, organizational, and political figures who would also be condemning in plain speech the plain spoken evil rhetoric and behaviors that now fill the nation. While the museum's exhibit is important, I hope it doesn't become just an historical tourist attraction. It needs the rhetoric of our own citizens as well to give it relevancy to our current national nightmare.

Yes, it does seem that the Heritage museum must be clear about its identity. It is quite possible to be a museum of Jewish Heritage, whose main focus is not the Holocaust and to still draw interested visitors. I visited such a museum in Paris, which also has a separate Holocaust Museum & Memorial. I found both interesting and the latter moving.

Thank-you for this. It is not only we must find new ways of presenting this past, but we need remember "the medium is the message" and the prime medium is in our everyday lives. I was born Jewish in Canada of holocaust survivors. My parents taught me "it was not as people understand it and so they will forget. Go see for yourself and help all the good people against the fewer number of bad people. We do not regret we did not leave for we were there in Poland for a thousand years. It was good for there was religion to help us when it was hard. Now we see Jews are forgetting and not understanding. " I stayed in Poland for over 25 years starting and running the largest private human rights organization. I returned to Canada and to America to find most are forgetting and still not understanding.

Gee, I wonder if, in order to get as close as possible to the real Auschwitz experience, visitors couldn't compete to be Inmates For A Day--sleep on actual wooden pallets, eat inedible food, be abused by guards, and so forth. Who would get to be an Inmate For A Day could be determined by lottery, or a competition where applicants write essays detailing their motivation, or by auction or even by that old stand-by first come, first serve. It's wonderful in itself that the public will get the chance to see first hand artifacts from the camps but think of how much more it will mean to get testimony from Inmates For A Day who've experienced first hand the abuse real inmates were subject to. The winners can recount their first hand experience on Oprah and Dr. Phil and Ellen and the late night shows. And is it to much to dream Inmate For A Day might lead to Lager Summer Camps where hundreds and maybe thousands of people could replicate this experience. Why, the possibilities are endless.

The story accurately calls Auschwitz-Birkenau a death camp. Deaths happened daily across the web of more than 100 concentration camps and sub-camps. But Auschwitz, where 1.1 million were murdered, is one of that set called death camps because they were built and operated to fulfill the primary mission of Germany in WWII - industrialized murder of all Europe's Jews. The other principal killing camps were Treblinka (it consumed most Warsaw Ghetto's inhabitants in 1942), Sobibor and Chelmno, all in Poland, home at the start of the war to half the nearly 6 million Jews murdered by Germany. Before the camps came the Einsatzgruppen, the machine gun killing battalions following German Army Groups A, B and C on the conquest of vast parts of the then Soviet Union -- the Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Baltic nations, most of whose peoples were willing witnesses or accomplices. In all, the camps killed 12 million, half of them Jews. This comment accurately says it was Germany, not Nazi Germany and Germans not Nazis (Austrians included) that designed and carried out the Holocaust on the direct order of Hitler. A nation did it, not an aberrant few. Germans bear the universal historic burden as, foremost, their grandfathers waged war to accomplish this most sinister of all aims. What makes the Holocaust different from every other atrocity ever is that it was done with cold blooded design and carried out by a modern nation in an act of deliberate, industrialized murder.

There is a Japanese museum that has had on loan for two decades a suitcase from a Auschwitz. It had belonged to a Czech girl named Hana. The Japanese museum is Kokoro - Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center for teaching tolerance, respect, and compassion . The book and film about the girl is "Hana's Suitcase." It is perfect for teaching third grade through middle school students about the Holocaust.

I am certain that the NY exhibit will be an emotional and compelling experience. I feel fortunate to have visited the campsite itself. It is a life-changing experience that reinforces the declaration NEVER AGAIN! A reminder for all that January 27th is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. Special thanks to the founders of the March of the Living that provides an opportunity for teenagers to experience in person the real horror of Auschwitz.

When I lived in New York I fortunate to have met a number of Holocaust survivors. The were friends parents, ran the laundry and my landlord. I will forever by touched by their humanity. And for those that deny this happened or quibble over this and that about the Holocaust “Wake Up” and stop being ignorant. Maybe we prevent man’s inhumanity to one another in the future.

In 1959 when I enrolled the Riverside campus of the University of California the film shot by the US troops when they entered Auschwitz was required viewing. "This I will remember and never forget", Elie Wiesel.

No matter what I read about the holocaust sadness overwhelms me. I am not sure I would hold up when visiting sites that vividly evoke its horror. How did so many willingly show no mercy and choose to do what the Nazis did?

The Nazis were not moon men - they were Germans - who invaded and occupied Poland - incorporated part of it (the area around Auschwitz) into the Reich while declaring the rest the General Gouvernment - an area for Untermenschen - who included others besides Jews. Mr. Lauder should be thanked for his (miniscule) funding of the Auschwitz Memorial. However, it was the survivors of the camp, both Jewish and Christian, who decided to create a memorial museum in 1946. It has been funded since then by the Polish people. Those were years when Germany received Marshall Funds to rebuild and Poland received nothing. Please bear that in mind.

As an American boy, I lack the resources to comprehend, but in our family in the '50s and '60s European and American Jews were our heroes. After all these years and the Hollywood saturation of "there's no business like Shoah business," I think we all need to step back and assess reality. I am the last one to talk of reality, however "fools rush in where wise men fear to go." First, there have been many holocausts in the 20th Century: Armenians, Assyrians and Coptic Greeks; Ukrainians and Tatars; Roma and Sinti; Hereros; Rwanda; and Cambodia. Add to that the "political" holocausts of German liberals and trade unionist, socialists, Catholic priests, homosexuals, and other undesirables. Focussing on only the holocaust of European Jews, although probably the largest and most intensely racial, will defocus the general fact that humans slaughter humans who are different. I just suspect the singular focus is a mistake, historically and socially. Second, we have to come to grips with the reality that the perpetrators (Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Turkish officials) were to some extent "ordinary guys." They were sociopaths and psychopaths, very bad men, but they did not have horns. Excessive demonization makes us blind to the next sociopath who comes along and who looks normal. Where is Aung San Suu Kyi on the Rohingya, which some are calling a genocide? Continual education is essential. But, it will not stop the next quiet genocide in some corner of the Earth. Uighurs?

Rather than spending at least $40 million on groups that support confederate monuments and promote racist ideology, American taxpayers ought to be supporting more museums like this, especially in areas that currently don't have opportunities for schoolchildren to visit. How else to make sure we don't forget about topics like anti-semitism and the Holocaust, American slavery, lynching and Jim Crow, Japanese internment camps and native American removal -- and the ongoing effects of these historical truths. A visit to a museum, especially as a young person but really at any age, makes people face reality and think. For more information on the how we continue to support the Confederacy, see: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/costs-confederacy-special-report-180970731/

When the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz in 1945, they kept marching westward. After the was, Poland established the site as a state museum, but had no money to make it into a "memorial park" the likes of Dachau (with e.g. atonement chapels, and one solitary barrack (the others symbolized by concrete slabs) having been rebuilt, quite artificially ). Thus, when I was there as a student in 1982 (the summer of martial law in Poland, not incidentally), it was basically intact, the way the Nazis left it as they fled. The here-depicted illustration of the exhibition in New York in no way reflects the revulsion and horror that left me vomiting on that day in 1982. I don't know what the answer is. I suppose that this is the closest that can be approximated. But it comes nowhere near to the reality. Not even the "Holocaust" drama from forty years ago, now being re-telecast in Germany, went so deeply. For those wishing to educate their children, I recommend the films Son of Saul (2015) and The Last Train (2006). These pull no punches.

Hopefully this isn't where "anti-Semitism leads" - because it's here to stay! It has certainly not always lead here, but given the capacities of the modern industrialized world, the risk is always there, to all of us - at least that the is the perspective put forth by Zygmunt Bauman in his book Modernity and the Holocaust, which highlights the dangers of modern efficiency and organizational capacities, not just to Jews (of which I am one), but to all of us. Including this perspective in educational efforts like this one might serve a fuller, more cogent narrative.

Invite Alice Walker to take a tour - maybe her attitudes will undergo a change.

The chief curator, Professor Van Pelt, has published outstanding archival work on Auschwitz. There are Holocaust deniers throughout the world, and he is among the historians who have provided architectural evidence accompanied by clear explanation which shows how Auschwitz was transformed into a death camp. The exhibition is, unfortunately, necessary now, a time when anti-Semitic discourse has become increasingly accepted by some on the Left in addition to traditional sources on the radical Right. I am glad that New Yorkers are being given the opportunity to learn more about an essential component of twentieth-century history.

The National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. captures these "experiences" powerfully and similarly. On my visit there, I'll never forget what it was like to walk through one of the train cars used to transport Jews to their death, or to see the sea of shoes behind glass in one exhibit. It's important that such a display exist in NYC--ideally in a permanent place.

I went to Dachau about 18 years ago. My husband could not bear to to in but I did. I came out weeping.

I visited the Dachau concentration camp a few years ago and was stunned by what I saw. Portions of the camp are preserved as it once was. To have actually experienced it , is beyond my ability to comprehend! I walked the crematorium, the horror of the barracks, the posts where they hung prisoners by their hands tied behind their backs, the blood ditches to carry away the blood of those that were shot, for Lebensraum. A very memorable part of the exhibit to me was the statue of a prisoner , emaciated, waiting for the end, and inscribed below the statue was the words of Santayana " those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., is one that every school-aged person should visit...and the rest of us, as well. The killing of millions of people takes a massive and organized effort, many people over a long period of time. The demons walk among us; in the words of Walt Kelly: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

The ones whose names we never knew The Jews of Europe ,the ones Hitler exterminated, were a special race, they were like a goldmine of talent, from these number came Einstein and Freud just to name a few, just think of how many of the survivors went on to be scientists and inventors, writers, etc, and the children of these survivors, their achievements. What human talent was destroyed? The saddest thing about the Holocaust is that it continues to this day, it continues in the unborn souls of the slain, all those who would have been born if their parents lived, it isn't just 6 million dead its more like 60 million dead, and it continues from here to eternity. The Holocaust is the true end of civilization, we learned that human beings are capable of crimes so terrible its maddening just to think of them, and all it takes is a little prodding, just a little bit of prodding turns human beings into unrepentant monsters. The lesson of the Holocaust is simple...choose your leaders wisely. Cheer for and believe in the right people. Your vote is precious and it has consequences, demand the best of society in your leaders, choose the wisest Men, the wisest women, avoid those that speak evil, who kindle hate, hate has a life of its own. One day the human race will learn, the lessons of history are the best, of these one thing is clear: what ever has happened once can happen again. Teach your children well because that's the only way to stop a Holocaust before it begins.

Where does hatred come from? All the Aushwictz museums throughout the world seem to do nothing to eradicate it. and hatred begins with a "wall".

The most informative book on the scope and processes of the depopulation schemes of the German government under the Nazi party between 1934 and 1945 may be Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands" (2010). It tells a broader story than the boilerplate naming of a few camps people seem to take as a understanding, presuming the horror as universally understood and going about their day as though antisemitism explains even in part the complex mix of forces at play that included work and death camps and the planning of the deaths of 100 million civilians to create lebensraum for Germans. Snyder points out that people know the name Auschwitz because numbers survived it, while names of other camps are less well known because almost none did. Too much focus on too narrow a view of the whys and wherefores of the swath of history that is the first half of the 20th Century is not only a disservice but problematic historically. In fact WW1 & WW2 and the many other wars going on all over the world. The Balkans, China, Korea & Manchukuo, the occupations by empires run by France in Africa & Britain in India and SE Asia, the taking of Native land by Europeans in North America must all be considered to understand how a particular very hot spot came to be, between Berlin and Moscow.

While the Jewish Holocaust was not the only genocide that occurred in the 20th century, it strikes very close to home because So many Americans share familial and societal links to Europe. I do not for a moment believe we are on the path to something similar, but the fact that people very much like ourselves could engineer and execute the mass murder of millions is painfully disturbing.

Thanks for this article. I am going to make plans to see this. I have been to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland but it is important to see this curated portrayal as well.

Would like to suggest to those interested, artist David Kassan's works concerning Shoah survivors. Later this year, the USC Fisher Museum in LA, will present his Resilience Exhibition...each painting has a short video interview. The future has begun to frighten me as well. It seems our ability to evolve technologically has far outpaced our ability to evolve ethically and morally.

In this era where hate is being encouraged by our elected politicians, it is heartening to see that we will not let history be forgetten

As someone who almost never manages to travel to Europe, I look forward to paying respects and experiencing this exhibition.

This sounds like an important and timely effort. I hope many schools visit. I also hope that the museum includes video testimony from survivors. When I visited Yad Vashem (the Holocaust museum in Israel) the videos playing throughout the museum of survivors telling their stories were the most powerful, haunting and heartbreaking part.

" You only see the shell, the shadow ". And we are creeping towards entering that shadow. Don't let it happen, again. Don't let it happen, here. Resist, and VOTE. Vote like your life depends on it. It just might.

I know of some Students that could greatly benefit from a long, guided tour of the Cincinnati Museum Center. And it's conveniently very nearby. Just saying.