Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards

Panda,

You appear to have done a lot more of Europe than me! Because it's so close to me I am kind of saving a lot of it for when we are older and don't want to travel so far, have kids etc.

That said, I lived in Paris for 8 months (but the only other place that I got to in France was Nantes) and have gone on sun holidays to the South of Spain (only 4 days) and Portugal (we spent a night in Lisbon and crossed the Spanish border to Seville and Cadiz) and a great trip to Crete and Santorini. I've also been in London lots, and Devon once, and also Edinburgh.

I've never been to Scandanavia, but have a friend moving to Norway next week so I will definitely get there at some stage, I was in Italy as a toddler, but am getting there twice this year thanks to my birthday present and a wedding, so this year I really am playing catch up with Europe! Next on my Europe list after this year is Barcelona, I am really keen to get there.

Re: Auschwitz. I hope that this doesn't get too controversial or upset or offend anyone so I will choose my words carefully, but please bear with me, and if you are very sensitive about this topic please stop reading now.

I felt funny about going there. Same as I felt about going to Ground Zero with my Dad, very good analogy. But I am really glad that I did go. I think sometimes we just use the phrase "concentration camp" or "holocaust" without appreciating what actually happened to the million or so people who were sent to these camps, and that each one was a person, with a life, with dreams and hopes, family and friends, not just a number.

I learned facts that never struck me before, despite having studied WW2 in school, I was quite ignorant of a lot of reality, and even things that I should have known. I understand better now that these were everyday people like us who were killed for no reason. It's so easy to de-humanise history and our Auschwitz tour definitely humanised it. We spent about an hour and a half at Auschwitz and then about an hour at Birkenau.

Certainly, at times during the tour it felt wrong, and awkward. Like when school groups took photos of themselves at the Wall of Death where the firing squad used to execute. It felt completely wrong. I took a few photos, one of the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign over the gate, one of the watchtower and layout in Birkenau and a couple of the outsides of buildings. Some of my fellow tourists horrified me by photographing everything, the internal exhibitions, the shoes and clothes that were left behind, the photos of victims, even the inside of the remodelled crematorium. I felt very very strange and uncomfortable in the crematorium where people were initially gassed, before they built the purpose built ones.

Our tourguide was Polish, and was good with facts. She gave us a frank rundown on who got to the camps, who was killed immediately, how they were enticed to go there, who was kept to work there, what living conditions were like etc. It was a very solemn tour and we were constantly reminded that it was like being in a cemetery and to respect the dead and those who had passed through the camp.

Some facts that I either did not know or did not appreciate:
- The people who had to do the cremations (and even harvest hair from the corpses) were other prisoners. They found their friend and families bodies among the dead.
- The Nazis kept everything belonging to the dead. There are display cases full of shoes, spectacles, even false limbs at the museum.
- It wasn't just Jews that were at the camp (but they were the ones that were usually killed instantly, going from the train to the gas chamber) but also political prisoners (like intellectuals and academics) from Poland and surrounding countries, and gypsies.
-many thousands died in the camps of disease and starvation due to the horrific sanitary conditions.

I think I will leave it there for now, if you have any questions do ask. I'm not convinced that I have expressed myself in the way that I intended but it is very hard to put words on it.

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S.

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