Easily distracted by shiny things.

[romanticalgirl]

I currently sound like I've been smoking for 80 years. Also, I am apparently giving up lungs for lent. Or would be if I was Catholic. As it is, I'm just giving them up because they apparently don't work and are trying to exit my body through a coughing strategy

Comments

[draconic_girl]

I've visited (think it was spring 2005): Auschwitz/Birkenau, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbruck. And on that same journey we also visited Kraków (saw the Jewish ghetto area)and then the the Checkpoint Charlie museum in Berlin as well as the Wannsee Villa*.

I can safely say that I will never forget that week. I was around 17-18 then, and the visit to Poland & Germany was part of a Holocaust-themed course/project for school.

To actually have visited these places; you don't quite feel the magnitude of all that you have seen before you get home.

The most unforgettable part was actually sitting down and listening to a Holocaust survivor at Ravensbruck.

So, yes it is quite a different experience to actually visit the places rather than just a museum or talking about them during history lessons. Like the teachers said that when we were travelling homewards, you started seeing how the whole experience sunk in.

*The Wannsee villa, to see the plans drawn up for the final solution and seeing the lists on the wall, to see that they had the number of Jews living in Finland listed on that as well... it was just such a striking moment and all this horror was at odds with how pretty the surroundings were.

Yeah, long-comment here.

[romanticalgirl]

This is exactly what I want, and what I wanted at the Holocaust museum. Instead it was kind of overwhelming in all the wrong ways - lots of information about the hows and whys and wherefores, but the human element of it was missing in so many ways. I learned a lot, but I didn't *feel* it the way I wanted to, and I'm the easiest person in the world to make cry about stuff - I cry at the old AT&T and Hallmark commercials, you know?

Maybe it was just that so much of it in the museum was visual - pictures and TVs and things to read. The only place that really hit me was when we walked into a room that was filled with all these old shoes, and you could smell the leather and it just *hit* you how real it all was. There were a couple other times that I got that feeling, but that was the strongest one.