Want to learn a little about the world without leaving your seat?

[HoLeChit]

I have something for you then. In the process of moving I stumbled across some stuff I saved from my 2017 trip to Germany. Honestly, I loved the place. Have considered going back or even moving there temporarily ever since. Found one of the handful of pamphlets that I picked up at the Buchenwald concentration camp. It’s now a UNESCO site, and a place I will remember for the rest of my life. I cannot begin to express how it felt to be there, even now just reading through my tourist pamphlet it gives me serious chills. Maybe you’ll find the perspective of history from a non American standpoint interesting. Maybe you’ll feel a tiny fraction of what I do.

I feel that as Americans we can take to heart the importance of remembering the bad in our past, and how far we have come past it. Breaks my heart that so many people now want to erase the history of our nation, regardless of how bad things may have been.

 

[HoLeChit]

 

[Fredkrueger100]

Thanks for sharing that. It’s still hard to believe all that happened. My wife’s great grandma and her family were able to flee from over there before they were put into a camp. She lived to be almost 100 and died a few years ago.

 

[John6185]

I have friends in Germany that were in Concentration Camps as well as my own relatives. The Germans would tell the Jews that they were going to a very nice resort or country club, perhaps a high class hotel and some would show up in lace dresses, suits and ask for a room with a view and they were abruptly shocked. The German authorities were very adept at "twisting the truth" in order to keep the people in line until the last moment of arrival at the camps. Jews were removed from government jobs and then civilian jobs and ultimately not allowed to even have a job or own a business. They were reduced to abject poverty whether they were university professors, Doctors, scientists or even Rabbis.
I cannot imagine one human treating another so brutally simply because of their nationality. But it happened within my lifetime and those that say the Holocaust is a hoax need to research history and stop listening to liberal college professors. I wonder if it could happen again if things just happened to line up...

 

[dennishoddy]

I went to High School with a guy that had parents in the concentration camps. They married after being released, moved to the US, Ponca City in particular and operated a fast food business until they retired called the Dixi Dog on the South end of town. Still use car hops to this day.
Michael Wrote a book about their lives.
I've seen the numbers tattooed on their arms from the concentration camps. They never hid them.

https://www.amazon.com/Books-Michael-Korenblit/s?rh=n:283155,p_27:Michael+Korenblit

 

[Fro]

Let us never forget the slaughter of all the Jews by the Nazis.
Russia slaughtered 100s of millions Jews and Christians back in the same time period to wipe out religion in their country. Let us not forget that slaughter as well.
The current fight against religion in our country is worrisome.

 

[TedKennedy]

Let us never forget the slaughter of all the Jews by the Nazis.
Russia slaughtered 100s of millions Jews and Christians back in the same time period to wipe out religion in their country. Let us not forget that slaughter as well.
The current fight against religion in our country is worrisome.

Buchenwald held all stripes of prisoners, not just Jews.

 

[HoLeChit]

Thanks for sharing that. It’s still hard to believe all that happened. My wife’s great grandma and her family were able to flee from over there before they were put into a camp. She lived to be almost 100 and died a few years ago.

I agree. In person you really feel the enormity and the real nitty gritty of it. For example, you can tell when the bricks were made in Germany during ww2. At the start of the war they looked like normal bricks, towards the end they looked like really thin honeycomb in an effort to save resources. The Nazis bled the country dry. You can see it with pictures of the guards and such too. Looking at some You can just tell they were worn through, hollow shells of men. We’ve all seen the pictures of the Jews, gypsies, and others when they were freed, but I feel in the US we really skim over what happened before they got to that point. The abuse, rape, torture, and horrid conditions simply escape imagination. I like to think that I’m a reasonably tough individual, and have seen my fair share of death, killing, and horrible cruelty both on the battlefield and working with the public here at home. But something about Buchenwald was different. It was overwhelming, and there wasn’t even a lot there anymore. I’ll never forget it.

 

[HoLeChit]

Buchenwald held all stripes of prisoners, not just Jews.

Precisely. It started out as a POW/work camp kinda deal, it even explains on the first page the groups of people who were there.

Let us never forget the slaughter of all the Jews by the Nazis.
Russia slaughtered 100s of millions Jews and Christians back in the same time period to wipe out religion in their country. Let us not forget that slaughter as well.
The current fight against religion in our country is worrisome.

Where are you getting your information from? Soviet Russia killed roughly 12-20 million Christians, and the highest number of Jews in the Russian empire/soviet union was 5.4 million. The majority of Jewish deaths were due to Nazis, as the majority of Russia’s Jewish population lived on the eastern side of the country. 40% of the Jews that fought in allied armies were in the Soviet military. The Soviet Union is certainly not blameless, but let’s keep our facts straight.

The “persecution” of religious groups in our nation in no way compares or even parallels with Soviet Russia, nor the Nazis. I am in no way, shape, or form religious, but I find everyone’s outspoken opinions about religions in our society to be an issue. The United States was founded on the principles of freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Nobody should be telling anyone what they can or cannot do, outside of following basic laws. Let the Christians go to church, Muslims go to prayer, atheists go without either, the liberals hang out doing what they want, and so on. I wanna see gay dudes be able to get married, adopt kids, and be able to grow weed while competing in 3 gun matches on the weekend. It’s the good ol US of A. There’s shouldn’t be a religious group, no religious group, political party, or government entity that can tell us how to live or believe. Outside of the usual laws. I’m not talking anarchy.

 

[wawazat]

One of my strongest memories is walking through Fort Breendonk in Belgium when I was 14. They had managed to recover a large amount of charcoal art done by the people that were held there and it was heartbreaking seeing the despair depicted in the sketches. I was a pretty typical teenager when it came to looking at old stuff, but that experience captured my attention and had a very strong impact on the way I view the world.

As a part of that trip, we also started each morning with a history class taught by a Belgian teacher on what we were going to see that day. It became very apparent the history taught in any given country will have some bias towards making that country look great. I never heard anything critical about the US (Belgians as a whole are incredibly grateful and welcoming of Americans), but the perspective was very different from anything I had learned prior to that.