h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Touching.


I can't say any more

yes, when I edited this one I took quite some satisfaction that it may never be forgotton

I think the whole UG team feel that this is one of our more important entries. It was decided that it was not suitable for the Edited Guide, but it really is a perfect example of an entry which is too important to leave languishing in the hinterlands.

B.

Nothing to say to this except 'thankyou'

(A friend of mine who's a teacher took a group of kids round the Holocaust Museum in Washington recently: he said that when they came out and he was waiting for their reaction, he could see them all wanting to use words like 'fantastic' and 'amazing' and realising these weren't the right words after all. 'Anti-fantastic', perhaps).

Man's inhumanity to Man...the shame continues to this day.

True. I still find it incredible that people could do this to one another.
Thanks for recording this entry.

One of my close friends almost got locked into that same Washington Holocaust Museum; That would have been a hell of a night...

I must admit, this one was a forced read. I'm left feeling hollow, and thats probley as it should be. When a word that can properly describe any of what this article relates to comes to being, it'll have lots of *********** sandwiched between two lettters. NEVER AGAIN!

This very much mirrors my feelings after going to Auschwitz and Birkenau with a friend last year. I even made the same promise to myself that I would go back again.

It took me weeks to get over it, and so far I haven't felt strong enough to repeat the visit.

In my case, going round the original Auschwitz camp, with its huge displays of shoes, brushes, hair, was bad enough, but then going to Auschwitz II (Birkenau) was even worse. In my memory now, it extends to the horizon in every direction. Of course it's not that big, but it's much bigger than the original camp, and when you stand there and realise that the raison d'etre for this entire "industrial estate" was to despatch trainloads of people as quickly and efficiently as possible, well...

Thanks for allowing this article to stand.

I live in a village about 10 km away from the Flossenbürg concentration camp (in north-eastern Bavaria; Canaris, chief of the secret service in Paris during the war, was put to death here for leading an attack against Hitler). I can see the railroad on which people were transported to that camp from where I'm sitting right now. Since there are no trains any more using it, it has been turned into a road for bikers where people go for a walk.

None of them think that they are taking out the dog on a road, that lead people to certain death only half a century ago. Neither do the people in Flossenbürg, whose houses are standing right were the barracs for the inmates stood. And neither do I. I enjoy biking with some of my friends, camp at a hill near Flossenbürg and look at the ruin of the castle at a hill near the village.

Two years ago I visited it twice; the first time it was a guided tour with our school class, the second time I was the guide for a Canadian girl, who wanted to see the camp. It's function was a work camp, not a destruction camp, because of the Messerschmidt manufacture and the granite quarry in Flossenbürg. There was just to much work to do for the prisoners to shoot them at will.

The visits made me, as some described it, "numb". I was so sad that I had no chance to be angry and vice versa. At some times I felt nothing at all and at others it made all sense in a cruel way. It's very difficult to write about such a theme because there are no right words. People are offended in whatever way you write about it, especially in Germany. You must talk about the Third Reich, you have to do it politically correct, you annoy people, you must not be proud to be German, you have to think of the dead, you have to think of the living, you have to think of the Jews (ONLY the Jews. I never heard anyone talk about homosexuals, Russians, lunatics or all the other ones.), you mustn't talk about it at all.

In Berlin they build a monument for the Jews (not for ALL the people murdered by the NS-Regime) for 7 million Euro and NPD (A party for neo-nazis. They are in the government of several Bundesländer.) parades are protected by the police. Sometimes I ask myself why the hell they can't once and for all quit with the past, kick out the NPD, give the money to those who really need it and accept that our grandparents made a really big mistake which is not to be repeated.

It may not interest anyone who is reading this, but now that this entry reminded me of my own KZ visits, I just had to put things down somewhere.

"I was so sad that I had no chance to be angry, and so angry I had no chance to be sad"

That is one of the most profound statements I have read about how respond to the truly and deeply shocking.

Thank you for writing so eloquently. Your post is, in many ways, a guide entry in itself, and I would encourage you to write what you have posted here in an entry and submit it to the Alternative Writing Workshop. My guess is that it would not be long before it is picked, and these things should be said and read.

Thanks once again for writing. Your words have moved me.

Ben