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Is Auschwitz Haunted?

Kazza34

Kazza34

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Aug 4, 2005
Messages
60
If some ghosts are the product of the stone tape theory (i.e. a powerful emotional or tragic nature is somehow captured within the stonework of a location and replayed – like a tape – in a fixed location, to certain people or under certain circumstances). would you not think that places like Auschwitz, Belsen and other places that had witnessed mass genocide would be heaving with stone tape activity?

Has anyone ever read anything about such activity at places like this? I have yet to read of one but would be interested to know if others had come across such accounts.
 
My father works for an ex-service personnel charity. In the eighties our family solicitor was a colleague of his. The solicitor had been involved in the Nuremberg trials. During this period after the second world war he and his family were in quarters at the site of a former death camp.

The solicitor's wife told my mother of this experience. Her young children would wake in the morning and tell their mother that during the night they were visited by people and that they had 'large noses'. I'm sorry if anybody finds that insulting but they were the words of the children who at that age had no concept of the holocaust. There was further description but I do not recollect it.

The solicitor is now dead and my mother is no longer a reliable witness to that testimony. One of his children now practices law in the same county town. I would quite like to ask him if he remembers this experience.
 
I visited Auschwitz 3 years ago, in the middle of March, and a cold, dreary place it was too. WELL worth a visit. I recommend it. Lots to see, all of it terrifying and soul-destroying.

What I noticed at the time was that there were no birds there, even though there are lots of wires, fences etc for them to roost on, and plenty of tourists (even at that time of year) wandering around eating. In other places, you'd be mobbed or at least followed around by hungry birds.

This made an impression on me, though it wasn't until later that I learned that there is a belief that birds avoid the place. :shock:
 
escargot1 said:
I visited Auschwitz 3 years ago, in the middle of March, and a cold, dreary place it was too. WELL worth a visit. I recommend it. Lots to see, all of it terrifying and soul-destroying.

What I noticed at the time was that there were no birds there, even though there are lots of wires, fences etc for them to roost on, and plenty of tourists (even at that time of year) wandering around eating. In other places, you'd be mobbed or at least followed around by hungry birds.

This made an impression on me, though it wasn't until later that I learned that there is a belief that birds avoid the place. :shock:
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I have head this too, that there are no birds at Auschwitz, Belsen etc.
Interesting to hear this from someone who has actually been there. (Not someone from the media etc)
That must have been a very solemn day Escargot, but a day well spent too if that does not sound too awful.
 
Yup. I'd always wanted to go, and found myself in Krakow, just up the road, so it would have been rude not to.

It's a cheap bus-ride away from Krakow bus station, which is next to the market so you can stock up on lovely cheap Polish cakes and fruit for the trip.

There is no entry fee, though you can pay a guide to show you round in your own language, very cheap, and the guides are very knowledgeable. There are film presentations and exhibitions of the huge piles of property stolen from the people sent there.

Visitors can wander around everywhere, even in the famous tower over the railway track, and see the awful wooden huts where people lived and the ruins of the gas chambers where they died.

The January after I went, there was a commemoration there, which I watched on TV. What a cold, bleak, deathly place. Even thick snow couldn't make it beautiful. :(

I definitely recommend a visit.
 
Escargot, do you think the custodians of the place have just about 'got it right ' in terms of the atmosphere and presentation., I would hate to think that a place that bore witness to so much suffering and cruelty would be over commercial.

If I ever get the chance I will go.
 
ChristopherK2 thanks for that account.

If you hear anything from the solicitor's children would you let me know.

Thanks
 
jeff544 said:
Escargot, do you think the custodians of the place have just about 'got it right ' in terms of the atmosphere and presentation., I would hate to think that a place that bore witness to so much suffering and cruelty would be over commercial.
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As long as there is a McDonalds there, I'll be happy.



















































:roll:
 
No, there is no commercialisation at all, except for a discreet bookshop.

You can take photographs wherever you like and gawp as much as you want to at the execution wall, the 'Arbeit' arch and the skull-and-crossbones warning signs.

Everything you've seen on TV is still there, except for the prisoners.

You can even walk along the railway track and see where prisoners were divided into immediate/postponed death groups, as demonstrated on huge blown-up photos in the exhibition.

There is a very famous one, showing lots of dazed-looking passengers disembarking with their belongings, with an SS officer or doctor pointing some out for death. Many of the people in this photo have since been identified. You can stand in the exact spot, in the middle of the camp, and then just walk away freely afterwards. Made a great impression on me.

If you get the chance, go! You won't be sorry.
 
Well, forgive me. But Auschwitz would be the last place on Earth I'd go to for a holiday.

And I've been to Rhyl.

EDIT - cheap gag, I'm sorry. Rhyl's not that bad.
 
DrPLee said:
Isn't it a reconstruction?
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I believe that the gas chambers ARE reconstructed. Everything else is as is.
 
Nope, it is all real. It was kept as it was after the war by the Russians as anti-Nazi propaganda.

Some of the gas chambers were blown up, and you can visit the remains of them. Somewhere there is a photo of me elegantly leaning into one with my behind in the air. :roll:

What was reconstructed was the machinery of the crematoria. The equipment was dismantled and strewn about, in an apparent attempt to disguise its function, but was found and put back together later.

You can see the name of the maker stamped on it: Krupps. Like my mixer at home.

I am glad I went, and I would go again.

When we were there, several busloads of Israelis rolled up, some students, some older people. Some serious praying went on beside the monuments. And we saw blokes in mirror shades, keeping a discreet distance from each group, talking into their collars, one hand always in a pocket. ;)
 
Wow, thank you, I hadn't seen that.

There's a huge amount more to see if you visit in person. Exhibitions, films in various languages, big rooms full of looted property.
 
ChristopherK2 said:
Her young children would wake in the morning and tell their mother that during the night they were visited by people and that they had 'large noses'. I'm sorry if anybody finds that insulting but they were the words of the children
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Interesting. Now, as we all know who the big-nosed people might have been, wonder why it would have been they that "visited", especially as that race were the minority of victims at Auschwitz/Birkenau, (despite what the Holocaust "Industry" imply)
Perhaps they heard their parents criticising their clients, the driving force behind the Nuremburg Trials, an example of how we unconsciously adopt our parents' attitudes?
 
Interesting. Now, as we all know who the big-nosed people might have been, wonder why it would have been they that "visited", especially as that race were the minority of victims at Auschwitz/Birkenau, (despite what the Holocaust "Industry" imply)
Perhaps they heard their parents criticising their clients, the driving force behind the Nuremburg Trials, an example of how we unconsciously adopt our parents' attitudes?[/quote]

Um.........what? Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
 
Yes, perhaps, Koh_si_chang. Or perhaps you're nuts.

The death camps were a place of great emotion and sadness. I'm surprised they're not packed to the rafters with ghosts.

Speaking of ghosts of death camp victims, there is a bizarre film called "Genghis Cohn" starring Diana Rigg and Robert Lindsay. It was on BBC a few years back and was a black comedy about a death camp victim haunting the former Nazi officer who ordered his execution. Very dark and twisted. But hilarious.
 
especially as that race were the minority of victims at Auschwitz/Birkenau
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I don't believe I stated which camp it was because I do not know.

One explanation is that the infants were repeating the words that adults had expressed in their presence. It is often conventiently forgotten that in the first quarter of the twentieth century Germany was not particularly antisemitic when compared with other European countries. Great Britain and France to suggest but two.

It is quite likely that despite the evidence of the recent holocaust British people continued to use derogatory language. One value of holocaust remembrance and the preservation of sites such as Auschwitz is that by considering the processes of separating "them" from "us" and the cultivation of disgust it is manifest that genocide can be perpetrated and ignored in any society. The holocaust and holocaust denial is the shame of the human race. The only real industry associated with the holocaust was that in which human life was extinguished.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
Race?
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Yes, "race".
I believe the posting about big noses referred to Jewish people, who were considered by the Nazis to be a different race, even to the point of being able to pick out physical racial traits.
In the past, Jews have even seen themselves as a seperate tribe, or race, to the point of saying that anyone could convert to Judaism, but they wouldn't become "proper" Jews, it was a blood thing, not a faith thing. Which I guess fuelled anti-Semitism throughout the ages, bolstering the "them and us" charges.
British law was changed many years ago to include anti-Semitic offences under Anti-racist laws probably because the average anti-Semitic offence is a whole lot more violent and disturbing than calling someone a big nosed Kike, and until very recently, committing offences against a person on the grounds of their religion was considered to be a thing of the past and not worthy of enforcable laws. If you commit an anti-Semitic offence, you are a racist.

To the OP, re the "stone tape theory", perhaps the deaths there were not violent enough to create an impression. That is not to trivialise the horrors of the place, but from accounts I have read, people filed into their deaths in a pretty orderly fashion, despite being warned by other inmates what fate awaited them. There seem to be few, if any, reports of trainloads of people panicking and having to be forced into the "de-lousing" areas. Indeed, these camps were overseen by relatively few armed men, certainly not enough to stop a terrified mob trying to escape their deaths.
It seems that the inmates were resigned to their fates through either extermination, disease or by being worked to death. For many, their death would have been a long drawn out process, they would have been well aware of it's approach. Perhaps that lessens the efficacy of the surroundings to make a "recording"?
Compare that to Dresden or Hamburg, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed in one night in bombing raids which they thought they would be able to weather, as they had done previously, I would have thought they would be more likely candidates for "soaking up" the effects of multiple sudden violent deaths.
 
Indeed, I doubt you can get better examples of sites of large-scale instant, sudden, violent death. Perhaps those that left their shadows behind left other traces.
 
Yes, and notwithstanding.

About 2 years ago I worked with a woman who apparently was married to a British (I think) RAF officer stationed for a couple of years at or very near to the Belsen buildings, some of which were still functional in some capacity. Or they were stationed in a part of the compound or very nearby (can anyone confirm if this sounds plausible).

Being the only person in an office of about 30 with an interest in this kind of thing I asked her if anything strange had happened whilst they were there... She told me that the whole time they were there strange events surrounded them, from the at times unbearable weight of sadness and oppression they were all encumbered with (I felt a rather strange and out-of-character thing for her to say, as she was a fairly down-to-earth and straight woman, not much given to that kind of talk) to actual tales of seeing and hearing inexplicable things regularly.

She told me that the camp hospital was in use for storage or similar by the RAF. No one dared venture into the basement it was so downright scary. There was a specific story about a practical joke that went wrong, resulting in 2 new recruits being locked in there for the night. The rather trite ending saw one of them disappear into the surrounding woodland, never to be seen again, the other of them being committed to a mental institution.

She also claimed that she had many photos from her time at the camp that showed ghostly images. However these were in her loft at home and they never materialised for me to look at, and I did somewhat pester her.

She did however describe the hospital and the particular windows, just narrow horizontal windows in a row across the top. She also described the long road to the camp and mainly, just a very sad atmosphere that could be felt for miles around...

Unfortunately I no longer work with her, although I could probably get in touch. Not sure how much of it I believed, not all of it, not none of it.
 
I don't believe that any buildings survive at Bergen-Belsen. The site was burnt to the ground (I think in 1945). There are a number of memorials there, mass graves and some foundations.

There is an RAF station at Celle (a short distance away). I don't think that any of the station is within the boundaries of the former camp.
 
We lived not far from bergen belsen in the 80's. Whilst living in Germany I read so much about the holacaust and wanted to become a nazi hunter. :(

One crisp snowy January day we went to bergen belsen. The atmosphere was nothing like I'd felt before.Mass graves that were hard to look at and imagining how many people were in one grave.

The whole area felt heavy,overwhelming and we had been told you won't hear birds singing.You didn't, just complete silence yet we were surrounded by trees.

We carried on walking and accidentaly came upon a little gate.We weren't sure if we could go through. I was shocked to see another mass graveyard,but this one was entirely for Russians. I left begen belsen overwhelmed and could not comrehend the local villages thought it was a sausage factory.

We came back to the UK but went back in the 90's with our daughter as schools didn't cover it.It still had a profound effect on us all, just the stillness and overwhelming quietness.
 
I can confirm the no birds theory too - I visited Mathausen camp in 2000 - horrible place, don't think I've ever felt so depressed in my life. No birds, no sound really, just bleak, grey cold concrete under a similarly coloured sky.

Even worse, and I hope this isn't too upsetting for anyone reading... but next to the gas chambers was a cold room that had been used for storing bodies (on their way to the crematorium presumably), and it smelled faintly like meat. Even after all that time.

That's the thing that has stuck with me most vividly from the visit, although everything was appalling, the crematoriums looking sort of like bread ovens, still black with soot. Stone tables with gutters, for surgical experiments, and of course the gas chambers with their innocuous looking "shower heads".

http://www.remember.org/camps/mauthausen/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauthausen ... ation_camp
 
As long as there is a McDonalds there, I'll be happy.
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Prophetic words, spoken in jest:

Wrong, wrong, just wrong on so many levels...

Auschwitz-Birkenau ghosts...there is the business of the alleged photo of the shade of Irma Grese in one of the crematoria; atmospheric thing, but fake as all frick.

Irma seems to have become a neonazi/revisionist Joan of Arc; the ghost stories concerning her seem to be part of the drive to canonise her.

On the absence of birdsong...This detail crops up consistently in visitors' accounts, including visits to Aktion Reinhardt sites like Belzec and Sobibor which are located in heavily wooded locations.
 
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