An unforgettable school trip

[Roses]

One of our grandsons (16) has just returned from a school trip to Berlin where they visited the Reichstag and a concentration camp among other things. I phoned him a few minutes ago to ask how it went. He said he would remember it all his life, especially the shocking concentration camp, where they were also shown a gas chamber.

I think it is good for the present generation, and those to come, to never forget the horror of the Holocaust. How anyone can deny it happen beggars belief.

Have other posters visited a concentration camp, and if so what was their reaction?

[Steve H]

People have an amazing ability to believe or not believe things, if it suits their preconceptions to do so.

[Aruntraveller]

I went to Dachau just outside Munich on a trip to that area in 2009.

As you would expect very sobering and depressing.

All the things that you would expect to upset you, did. So piles of shoes, various pictures and artefacts, the actual chambers that you could walk through.

However, this is the thing, this was a large town maybe 12 or 15 miles outside a major German city.

What I found most shocking was how very mundane, ordinary and everyday the setting was.

[Steve H]

A quick google suggests that the camp must have been Sachsenhausen, which is near Berlin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachsenhausen_concentration_camp

[Harrowby Hall]

I have not visited a concentration camp but I have visited Oradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges. Shortly after D-Day a Waffen SS unit came to the village, rounded up all its inhabitants, locked the women and children in the church and the men in some barns.

The men were machine-gunned in the legs and when unable to move had petrol poured over them and burned to death. The church was set on fire and as women and children attempted to escape they were machine-gunned to death. Over 600 people died. The village was then partly razed to the ground.

The village has been preserved in the condition that it was left by the Germans.


I have also visited Hiroshima several times.

[Steve H]

I'm currently reading 'Hitler: a Study in Tyranny', by Alan Bullock, the classic, though now somewhat dated, biography. How someone as academically mediocre and lazy as Hitler achieved supreme power in a huge empire (albeit not for long) is a mystery.

[Anchorman]

One of our grandsons (16) has just returned from a school trip to Berlin where they visited the Reichstag and a concentration camp among other things. I phoned him a few minutes ago to ask how it went. He said he would remember it all his life, especially the shocking concentration camp, where they were also shown a gas chamber. I think it is good for the present generation, and those to come, to never forget the horror of the Holocaust. How anyone can deny it happen beggars belief. Have other posters visited a concentration camp, and if so what was their reaction?

Never visited a camp, though I have met two survivors; one of them was a very brave Dutch lady whose family hid Jews in their watchmakers' shop. She, along with her father and sister, were taken. She and her sister were sent to Ravensbruck, where her sister died. The lady's name was Corrie Ten Boom.She wrote a fantastic autobiography called 'The Hiding Place'. The other survivor was Johanna Dobsheimer - who was later married to one of the soldiers wo liberated her camp - and her married name was 'Hinsi' Douglas. She lived in Dunlop, North Ayrshire. Her story is also in a book - hard to obtain, but well worth a read - 'Selected to live'.

[Roses]

My grandson was very surprised that there were houses built right next to the perimeter of the concentration camp. He couldn't understand how anyone would wish to live next to something with such an evil history. I would hate to live next to that place.