Sobibor
http://www.deathcamps.org/sobibor/sobibor.html
Of course I am well aware of the genocide of the Jews and Gypsies by the Nazis, still it was a very strong experience to visit this place where approximately 250 000 people were murdered (I think that is the correct word to use). There is a museum there but it was closed for the season (there is apparently also a death camp-visiting-season!), but there was a path in the area with information boards. All buildings are erased to you have to use your fantacy a bit. I was heavily touched by the Remembrance Lane, where resently they have started to put small black stones with the names of people identified as killed there. The goal is to have all of the 250 000 identified. I don't easily cry, but here tears came flooding.
Obviously one can't avoid thinking about how these things can happen, both how such sick policies can be developed and how the individuals that actually executed the policies could do it? I have, as most of you I guess, read all kind of explanations. We hear that our civilized behaviour is just a thin varnish that easily can be broken under the right kind of conditions. Still, when you don't believe in EVIL it is hard to comprehend this. Of course similar things are going on also today - thinking about Darfur and Kongo, and Rwanda and Bosnia not so long ago.
My last thoughts were about the people living in that little village next to the camp. There were two thoughts: First what did they,or rather their parents do when this happened or are they all new people (the Polish border was adjusted heavily after the WW II and the population living there at the time of the camp were perhaps moved. Secondly, how is it to live in a place like this. I mean even without the camp in the vicinity it is a poor desolated area, adding the camp.....?????? I don't think I could live there. But perhaps that is what we have to do - reinstate and insist on normality instead of despairing from the abnormal.
I can never imagine how it really was in these deathcamps, it´s far beyond anything. Still I´m really touched by your description of your visit there. Only one thought can come in my head; we sometimes think our lives and society can give us hard conditions. But what the hell, if you compare!?
I am touched, it i too much. I have never understood why people did just stay beside without reaction, on the other hand a lot of people did react. As far as I understood a lot of people did manage to escape from this deathcamp
Gunnar, very good reading make your matter-of-fact comments on weird contradictory situations: how can one expect to be welcome at a guest resort when a bunch of wild dogs is running and barking loosely around, etc.
Excellent your comments on the bike, especially those half century old ones (bike myself +4000km yearly). Amazing how different the world becomes when travelled by bike and news things you discover even in places which you thought you knew already.
Understanding (if that word is adequate) Sobibor and the other camps is only possible when one realises that good and evil cohabitate all men.
It is amazing to realise that the eldest organic (reform) settlement, Eden Oranienburg, is at minutes distance from the terrible concentration camp of Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen and very near to the double statue of Goethe and Schiller in Weimar, there is on the Ettersberg, where Goethe frequently dwelt around and cogitated, the equally infamous camp of Buchenwald.
When you drive through sandy roads try to cover the cogwheels.
Good continuation
Carol
I too struggle to understand how the big wars could actually happen, and how people dealt with them. What did the foot soldiers on either side think and feel during D-day? How can they sleep at night? Perhaps they would rationalize they had no choice.
How could you work at a concentration camp? Perhaps you rationalised you only followed orders. This way of escaping responsibility and agony i believe is even institutionalized in the Geneva Convention.
How could you end up making this kind of policies? This is the one that really escapes me.
My mother was raised on the Swedish/Norwegian border. She could see Norway across the water. On the Swedish side convoy ships waiting to be let out. On the other side dark men of war, looming, breathing ice. Norweigians turning up on my mothers front steps, having swam for a few km. (How many drowned?) Nearly every time I visit these lovely waters, I can't help but being reminded that peace can't be taken for granted, and that society somehow have a destructive alter ego, much like Carol writes.
Good pedalling!
Johan
Seeing a concentration camp with your own eyes is an experience. I visited Auschwitz in the mid70s and still remember the buildings full of children's shoes, or spectacles.
As for the rationale, I recommend a book by Christopher Browning: Ordinary men:Reserve batallion 101 and the final solution in Poland. Available also in Swedish : Helt vanliga män, reservpolisbataljon 101 och den slutliga lösningen i Polen, Norstedts 1998. It is an account of the legal proceedings against the men of a batallion of reserves called up in 1942 and sent to Poland. Middleaged family men, not fit for the front which at that time was far to the east. The duty was quite simply to kill as many Jews, Gypsies and communists as possible. What differed in this case (there were many such battalions)was that the commanding officer gave his men a choice, if they did not want to participate they were not obliged to do so. The book paints a terrible picture of how ordinary men gradually literally got used to the daily killing of defenseless civilians.
