The United Nations might need to help, but it should be preserved....
oh, does this mean “out of sight, out of mind?” put it down the memory hole? I question the motives.
I doubt anyone told him that. I knew very little about the Holocaust when I first visited Dachau in the 1980's. The visit impacted me so much that I returned over a dozen times and learned everything I could about the Holocaust and, specifically Dachau. To this day, I speak about the place when it is appropriate to bring it up in conversation.
Decay... as opposed to “kept in perfect working order?” Sometimes a decrepit monument has just as much evocative power, as at Angkor Wat.
This is a very good question. On the one hand, we should never forget that evil, and how coldly it was done. On the other hand, if a people wallow in victimization, or guilt, then they never move forward and progress. Whatever we decide, the future will ultimately judge us.
Many Auschwitz survivors have told me that a visit to the camp can teach little to those who were not imprisoned there.
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For what it’s worth...and I can’t EVEN BEGIN to imagine what survivors experienced.....I found the visit SOBERING and UNFORGETABLE. I took a great interest in touring all of the places mentioned in ‘Schindler’s Ark’ and after seeing ‘Schindler’s List (based on it). Personally, I think it should be a requirement for all high-school aged kids to see....and I believe it is required by Polish authorities that theirs do. JMHO
Bronze It ...
Preserve it, not so it is not forgotten, but so it cannot be denied.
A year after the battle of Waterloo, bone collectors picked up the skeletons, then ground them up to be used as fertilizer in England.
In truth, there is little that is special about the Holocaust. It was not the only industrial genocide, nor was it unmatched in its inhumanity and brutality. Neither the Stalinist nor Maoist mass murders are forgotten, but there is no great lesson there, either, other than that tyranny is evil.
Except to the Jews. It was their final warning that they could never again rely on the good graces of others when threatened, and only by their hard work and diligence could they survive. It is an important lesson that should not be lost on us as well.
Would history be re-written then because no one would be around to say they were there or to show where the camp was?
If we let the memorial cease to exist, we will take a great burden on our conscience. We will trample upon the testament of the victims.I hope to be a false prophet in saying that, but if we allow Auschwitz-Birkenau to disappear from the face of the Earth, we might just be opening a way for a similar evil to return.
Prof Wladyslaw Bartoszewski is a historian, author, diplomat and former Auschwitz inmate.
I don't need to say more than that.
Once it is gone the Islamo-fascists and their ilk will claim it never was.
Apparently, physical existence and living (still) memory of the horrors committed there are lost on humanity - well, at least on the new ‘progressives’ in control of this country. Their manner, speech and newly formed plans are inching towards the very circumstances and events that perpertrated the environment for these horrors to occur all those decades ago.
The Iranians and other Moooslims wouldn’t mind, since they know it’s a fabrication, in the first place...
Something as historically significant as this should be preserved for future generations to see, first hand and up close, what power in the hands of evil men can do.
What would they do, put houses there?
I cannot imagine how haunted that place must be.
It’s ghastly, but it is a monument to the awful things people - and governments in particular - can do.
National Socialist Obama needs it to remain standing. It’s his model for the future of his political enemies.