The sad truth is that most Americans, especially Trump voters, are likely, maybe, to have heard of Auschwitz, and even then only having heard of it and not knowing what it is, but have never seen those others in their life.
I’m admittedly a little better read on the subject than most Americans
Off the top of my head, I’d probably be able to rattle off Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Krakow, and Treblinka off the top of my head.
Small side rant, my mom’s side of the family is Polish. Most of my mom’s grandparents (my great grandparents) were off-the-boat from Poland, I know at least one of them never became a US citizen. We have some family still in Poland, we’re not exactly in regular contact but we know more or less how to track each other down when we want to.
Years ago, well-before I was born, my mom’s family went to visit those relatives. There is honestly probably enough material from that trip (and from when a relative from Poland was able to visit the US back then) to write a pretty decent short book, or at least a couple solid blog posts. Lots of interesting comparisons between the state of things in the US and Poland during the Cold War to be made.
One of the things they did was visit Auschwitz. Seeing that was something that definitely shaped my mom’s worldview from there on out. To her credit, my mom already had her head screwed on pretty straight before that when it came to racial tolerance and such.
She would occasionally tell us little bits about it when we were growing up, not like she purposely sat us down and gave us a Holocaust talk or anything, it was just something that came up occasionally when appropriate
I don’t know if this was ever an intentional choice by her, but she never really said who built and ran the camps, who was sent there, why, etc. she pretty much just left it at they were places that existed, and that people did various kinds of horrible things to other people there.
As far as I knew, it was all Polish people (not unlike myself) doing horrible things to other Poles, for reasons I couldn’t really wrap my head around. It wasn’t until we started learning about WWII and the Holocaust in school that the details of who and my started falling into place.
But by that point, I think the key message about people being capable of immense cruelty towards other people had really been firmly planted in my mind. The fact that one side or the other are Jews, Poles, Germans, LGBT people, Romani, black, white, Hispanic, Christian, Muslim, Palestinian, Hutu, Tutsi, Armenian , Uyghur, etc. isn’t really important compared to the idea that this is something that people like me could do to other people who are also just like me, and I need to be vigilant to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Here are some scary facts about Treblinka: it was in operation for about 18 months, was staffed at any one time by about 25 German officers and soldiers and 100 civilian workers, executed people with the exhaust from a single salvaged Russian tank engine, and murdered about 900,000 people in total. People tend to assume that the Holocaust was a massive industrial-scale operation that used up a huge fraction of German resources, but in fact it was a remarkably low-cost operation for the most part. Even the transportation aspect largely made use of supply trains returning otherwise empty from the front. If Hitler had not been stopped militarily, Germany would have had no technical difficulty in carrying out his goal of literally exterminating the nearly 200 million people of the Soviet Union.
Alligator Auschwitz
Bum-Fuck Buchenwald
Crocodile Kraków
DeSantis Dachau
Everglades Esterwegen
Gator Gross-Rossen
Hillbilly Hinzert
MAGA Mauthhausen
Redneck Ravensbrüch
South-Florida Sachsenhausen
Trump Treblinka
Lizard Lichtenburg
Florida Flossenbürg
Miller’s Mittelbau
RFK Ravensbrück
The sad truth is that most Americans, especially Trump voters, are likely, maybe, to have heard of Auschwitz, and even then only having heard of it and not knowing what it is, but have never seen those others in their life.
I’m admittedly a little better read on the subject than most Americans
Off the top of my head, I’d probably be able to rattle off Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Krakow, and Treblinka off the top of my head.
Small side rant, my mom’s side of the family is Polish. Most of my mom’s grandparents (my great grandparents) were off-the-boat from Poland, I know at least one of them never became a US citizen. We have some family still in Poland, we’re not exactly in regular contact but we know more or less how to track each other down when we want to.
Years ago, well-before I was born, my mom’s family went to visit those relatives. There is honestly probably enough material from that trip (and from when a relative from Poland was able to visit the US back then) to write a pretty decent short book, or at least a couple solid blog posts. Lots of interesting comparisons between the state of things in the US and Poland during the Cold War to be made.
One of the things they did was visit Auschwitz. Seeing that was something that definitely shaped my mom’s worldview from there on out. To her credit, my mom already had her head screwed on pretty straight before that when it came to racial tolerance and such.
She would occasionally tell us little bits about it when we were growing up, not like she purposely sat us down and gave us a Holocaust talk or anything, it was just something that came up occasionally when appropriate
I don’t know if this was ever an intentional choice by her, but she never really said who built and ran the camps, who was sent there, why, etc. she pretty much just left it at they were places that existed, and that people did various kinds of horrible things to other people there.
As far as I knew, it was all Polish people (not unlike myself) doing horrible things to other Poles, for reasons I couldn’t really wrap my head around. It wasn’t until we started learning about WWII and the Holocaust in school that the details of who and my started falling into place.
But by that point, I think the key message about people being capable of immense cruelty towards other people had really been firmly planted in my mind. The fact that one side or the other are Jews, Poles, Germans, LGBT people, Romani, black, white, Hispanic, Christian, Muslim, Palestinian, Hutu, Tutsi, Armenian , Uyghur, etc. isn’t really important compared to the idea that this is something that people like me could do to other people who are also just like me, and I need to be vigilant to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Here are some scary facts about Treblinka: it was in operation for about 18 months, was staffed at any one time by about 25 German officers and soldiers and 100 civilian workers, executed people with the exhaust from a single salvaged Russian tank engine, and murdered about 900,000 people in total. People tend to assume that the Holocaust was a massive industrial-scale operation that used up a huge fraction of German resources, but in fact it was a remarkably low-cost operation for the most part. Even the transportation aspect largely made use of supply trains returning otherwise empty from the front. If Hitler had not been stopped militarily, Germany would have had no technical difficulty in carrying out his goal of literally exterminating the nearly 200 million people of the Soviet Union.