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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7842671.stm

This is surely something that every country should be contributing to, the fact that places like this could be lost forever scares me.

I really hope that funding is found ... and quickly !!

There are 4 tabs at the top of the page, worth a read of all of the pages.

Blonde donor?

I'm amazed there's a whole story on the funding from other countries to its upkeep and not even a single mention of Israel. You'd think that would be one country that might want to stop the Holocaust from fading from memory.

Maybe killing Palestinians just seems like a better thing to spend money on.

Been a few times, seems strange it struggles with funding seeing as the world has so many rich jews.

+1

why don't they charge visitors?

It has many more rich people from other faiths sir

lol

No shit sherlock and its not a slant on Jewish people but they seem to make such an issue over the holocaust you would think taking 0.00001% from the Israel militery budget would make sense to preserve an important historical area.

Sorry but your remark was a slant on Jewish people. I as a Jew living in Britain have no influence on the Israeli military budget.....I just didn't like your comment...simple as

Wow, how dare they !!!  wtf has the holocaust got to do with them anyway !!

lol I didn't mean its not a big thing :) but obviously its a huge part of Jewish heritage and history that cannot be forgotten. I just find its extremely strange that its been left to decay and now it requires funding for it to be maintained.

The point I was trying to make Kev (but I am shit at explaining it) what with all the loonies trying to pretend the holocaust didn't happen you would think it would be a number one priority by everyone but more so the Jewish community around the globe to keep the memory alive. Not rocket science.

Just don't see a problem with saying a member of a certain community/faith etc should fez up and pay for something that's of a particular interest or of cultural significance to them. You might interpret that as a slant I didn't nor did my Jewish wife who agreed with it.

WRONG WRONG WRONG on so many levels, why should it be the victims that shoulder the financial responsibilities ?

Should they pay more than the Germans ?  

Every country across Europe, AND the USA should be contributing imo, Europes heritage and history should not just be medieval castles and roman ruins etc etc , the horrors of our history should be preserved to serve as a reminder of darker days.

Well my Jewish wife does......and you know what they say..." if you put two Jews in a room you are likely to get three opinions"

It shouldn't be down to the victims, but in the real world all our cultural and historical sites are not funded enough and its a real shame. My personal belief is like yours the governments should fund it, but is this going to happen? :(

lol snat...made me chuckle..

This.

so true

I used to drive once or twice a week past the site of bełżec extermination camp where 1/2 million jews were killed

I used to live in zolochiv, a ukrainian town that until WWII was polish. buried in the town are tens of thousands of victims of first stalin's purge of the inteligensia and then later hitler's purge of everyone else

virtually no-one has ever heard of these places despite the attrocities happening in living memory and there are many, many more like them

it would be an absolute tragedy to let the one place that everyone has heard of disappear

everyone should visit aushwitz imo. until you do it's almost impossible to quantify the sheer numbers you read about in history books or to contemplate the sheer evil involved

acid, you're gonna have to get the vatican in on this as well I'm afraid. most of the people killed in auschwitz I were polish catholics so they can pay for that bit and israel can pay for birkenau

I hear the pope has a few bob spare! let the bugger pay for it then :)

Governments should spend on preventing future genocide rather than preserving old concentration camps imo

sorry to be thick here but why in a worldwide depression where trillions of dollars have disappeared over the last year and previously wealthy countries are close to being bankrupt, millions of starving/homeless people etc etc  should governments pay for this and not the millions of visitors who are presumably happy to pay for travel hotels etc why not put up a £5 entry fee? OAPs and children FOC LDO

I know what happened was totally wrong but I do think the sheer numbers of other nationalities who died during the war almost gets forgotten about sometimes, because the persecution of the Jews always makes the front page of these discussions. Something to think about really........

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

What I find more shocking than the government not coughing up (no big shock there really), is that it's only just been deemed newsworthy now.  If all of us who care (regardless of what denomination we do or don't belong to) were to donate a one-off small amount, it would make a massive difference.  Does anyone know if there is there a fund set up?  

http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/m/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=523

There is only one thing worse than Auschwitz itself...
…and that is if the world forgets there was such a place.
  Henry Appel, Auschwitz survivor

This isn't an opinion, just a question, but why do we want to maintain a place where millions of people were slaughtered?

So future generations don't forget that they were slaughtered, and that humans are capable of such acts.

Thanks Kev

From the world heritage citation.

The site is a key place of memory for the whole of humankind for the holocaust, racist policies and barbarism; it is a place of our collective memory of this dark chapter in the history of humanity, of transmission to younger generations and a sign of warning of the many threats and tragic consequences of extreme ideologies and denial of human dignity.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

My only problem with that is that while Germany & their allies in WW2 are rightly made to remember their wrongs, all other such crimes, while not on the same scale, are quietly allowed to slip into history, and the lesson that any nation is capable of evil deeds is lost.

it's a hard one to put into words although the quote kev posted has a good crack at it

once you've visited you get an insight into what evil humanity is capable of that you never had before, just reading about it doesn't do that in the same way

Similar to having a memorial at the World Trade Centre sight in some respects

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is there to serve the same purpose.  It's interesting to note that the Genbaku Dome is recognised on the World Heritage list, but China and the US both opposed it's entry: http://whc.unesco.org/archive/repco96x.htm#annex5

I haven't been to Auschwitz, but I expect that it's similarly haunting and appalling (in terms of what humans are capable of doing to other humans).

Just found this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/holocaust/

+ 1

Not entirely sure why people think that the USA or UK should be contributing, personally I think we spent enough in terms of human life (and money) fighting the germans at the time. I am sure we are still paying off debt from this war.

I typed out a long answer .... then i deleted it.

Im sure your question is a level.

I typed out a long answer .... then i deleted it.

Lol! Me too.

I think ScottMGee's point is if it comes down to other countries needing to provide funding to keep Auschwitz from crumbling away, then countries which didn't sacrifice their people to stop the Nazis should probably be the first to open their wallets.

Surely the participants rather than the victims should be responsible for the upkeep as a stark reminder.

Regardless of whether or not Aushwitz is preserved Israel already has its own memorial museum in Yad Vashem which will ensure that the memory of those who perished at the hands of the SS will live on forever. However I'm with Kev here and hope that funds can be found to ensure the actual site of the genocide is preserved to remind the world of the attrocities of the Nazis.

Question - Kev will know this as he's been. Is there a place to make donations when you've visited?

If not I wonder what the thought was behind them not wanting donations. Surely the best time to get funding for it's upkeep is from the people who have just visited as they will have been so affected by their visit.

So ends Holocaust memorial day.

I wonder how many people were aware it was holocaust memorial day?

[ ] Me

[ ] Proud

Auschwitz being open hasn't prevented programmes of ethnic and religious genocide since the war.  It's happened in the Balkans and in Africa.  To forget what happened in Auschwitz is to forget the second world war really and I don't think it's possible. And whether we should forget is open to debate.  I also don't think it's possible to comprehend the level of suffering and the atrocious conditions of all of those camps unless you were there.  The reason why these camps are so notorious is because the suffering is incomprehensible, so keeping them open so people can visit them serves little purpose and also gives those with some horribly morbid fascinations with the holocaust an opportunity to indulge in really unhealthy voyeurism.  Auschwitz is a scar on humanity isn't it, and I think scars should be allowed to heel.  This is pretty tenuous metaphor but people who suffer horrific injuries in a car accident say, don't keep their wounds open so they remember to not drive like a tw*t.  It's in our nature to destroy ourselves and noe way or another we'll find reasons to justify wars and indulge in sort of thing whether the tools of the Nazi's final solution are completely forgotten or preserved forever.  

The more i think about it the less i see the need for Governments to pay for it, i haven't been there, however i know its there and i know of the holocaust. I don't need a camp that i will probably never visit to remind me of it.

The argument that it's a reminder that prevents the same things happening again is just wrong, genoicde goes on today, lets put our efforts into stopping that rather than preserving an old camp.

Maybe there is a good reason for keeping it around, all i know is one hasn't been mentioned on this thread yet.

the 2 are not mutually exclusive

Still, as days out go, I prefer the SeaLife Centre

+1

While it may be true that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it, if we do remember history we are still doomed to repeat it.

Keep concentration camps open as a memorial if you want, but don't kid yourselves that it's going to do shit all good in the grand scheme of things.

loads, but you run the risk of looking a right tit if it didnt happen.

Auschwitz is not a nice place, I have been.
It wasn't a very pleasant experience as you can imagine. I don't think I learned anything, the holocaust was an awful period of history, I knew that anyway.

I did see kids run around and nudge each other daring each other to go to the gas chambers like it was a lot of fun.
I saw a British tourist in his mid 30s mutter something about wanting to see how the bastard Germans would like it. I'm not altogether sure if he was meaning hisotrically or the one's today.

I don't think it's a positive place. If you take the likes of Hitler and Goring, Himmler and Goebbels when they were kids, and take them round the concentration camps that Britain used in the Boer War, what good would it have done?

I think those sick fucks would have been looking around and seeing how they could improve on the design.

So do what you like with the complex, but don't use my money. To be honest, I'd rather see the buildings crumble to dust.

I think destroying a place like Auschwitz is symbolically far more powerful that it's preservation.  The Berlin wall for example was another symbol of an inhumane ideology and when it was pulled down it was a huge moment of catharsis for so many people who had suffered behind it.  In fact the whole world united in seeing it being destroyed.  They didn't need to remove the wall to unite Germany, they could have left it up there as a symbol of the oppressive regimes that caused the partition of Europe, but it needed to come down to allow the unification to really being.

Auschwitz is essentially a mass grave and I hate the idea of 100's of thousands of tourists trampling through it every year mostly out of a morbid fascination with what went on there.  I think the same think should happen with Auschwitz as the Berlin Wall.  I think if Auschwitz was destroyed and certain parts of it cremated there might be that same sense of catharsis and closure for an atrocious period in our recent history. 

That reminds me, I must finish knitting that sweater