I feel this is worthy of six and half minutes of your life.

I have decided to post this video to my blog as an interesting and eye-opening view of the current state of being in the United States.  This blog is not intended to be a forum for my political views or any thing like that, rather this is an opportunity for my American and European friends to see something that I feel is lost to many of us in the media.  Not only for 'my' generation, but for the generations to follow.  As many of my students know, I have spoken at length about the world we are leaving for my nieces and nephews.

Dresden

High Tatras Mountains, Slovakia

Slovakia

Slovakia

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Auschwitz-Birkenau II

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Arbeit Macht Frei (Work makes [you] free)

Saturday the 20th we took an hour drive (from Krakow) to the town of Oświęcim which was the location of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during World War II.  When the Nazis entered the area in late 1939 they removed more than 17,000 local residents and built a 40km perimeter around the area, eventually building Auschwitz I (the base camp), Auschwitz II-Birkenau (the extermination camp), Auschwitz III (the labor camp) and 45 satellite camps.

Originally designed to be a camp for political dissidents and prisoners of war, it was later seen to be a perfect location for the Nazis to find their solution to the Jewish question.  Because of it's central location in Europe and vast connections to train networks, it became the biggest and deadliest camp of the war.  Between 1940 and 1945 at least 1 and a half million people lost their lives, of which about 90% were Jews.  It was a difficult and emotional day and I was surprised by just how much I learned.  This is now the third camp I have visited and I found the size and scale of it to be the biggest surprise as the extermination camp is absolutely massive.

Being that we visited the camp on a Saturday in the middle of July, likely the busiest day of the year for visitors, there was a ton of people there to tour the camp.  This is where we had our biggest problem with visiting Auschwitz.  When we arrived we saw this huge line to get into the camp and it became clear that we would be waiting a very long time to get in.  In the two plus hours we waited, we noticed one of the most disgusting things I have ever seen.  People were laughing and joking around, eating pizza, ice cream and sandwiches while they waited to enter the site of possibly the most evil place on earth.  We both saw this as unbelievably disrespectful and made me think about what it would feel like if we were first time visitors to the camp and had lost a friend or family member to this series of camps.  While it was an excellent experience, and one I will never forget, I think the impact could easily be lost when the very camp that saw so much suffering and starvation serves ice cream and pizzas just outside the gates.  An excellent Wikipedia article on the camp can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp

Kraków

Main Market Square

Kraków

Wawel Castle

Poland