Sobering Thoughts
Rohit and I went to Auschwitz Concentration Camp today, which is the largest Nazi concentration camp in all of Europe. It is about an hour out of the town of Krakow, Poland.The Nazis and SS succeeded in killing nearly 1.5 million people (men, women and children alike). Gas chambers (using Cyclon B), hunger, slave labour and disease were just some of the means through which people were killed.
The weirdest feeling for me was when we walked into the only gas chamber still in tact. It "only" could hold about 700 people (The other main ones could kill 2000). When I walked in it was almost as if there was a stench of death in the air. And looking around it was difficult to imagine I was standing in the same spot where just over 60yrs ago thousands of people lost their lives in a matter of minutes. Their crime: being Jewish, educated, Russian, Homosexual, politically opposed to the Nazis. People died simply for being people...
It is quite difficult to imagine the horrible attrocities that can be committed by humans and a place like Auschitz is certainly a sobering reminder that such terrible things should never be forgotten so they never happen again. Unfortunately for mankind even our recent history has examples of mass genocide (Cambodia, Rwanda and Sudan).
posted by Arvind @ 11:29 AM
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