Back well before I was born, my mother and her family made a few trips to visit relatives in Poland.
Frankly, she probably has enough material about those trips that she could write a book, or at very least a couple of solid blog posts about those trips, with the cold war in full swing and being able to compare and contrast their life in America with that behind the iron curtain.
But among the things that affected her most deeply from those trips was visiting Auschwitz.
She never exactly sat me and my sister down to give us a Holocaust talk or anything like that, but we got little bits and pieces of information dropped on us from time to time.
I don't think this was fully intentional on her part but whenever she talked about it, she was always a little light on context. The "where" was obviously Poland, at least for the camp she visited. Never really went into when it all happened, again it was obviously somewhere in the past, but no mention of WWII, it could have been in the recent past just before so visited, it could have been 200 years ago.
And most importantly, no mention of the who or why. No mention of Germans, Nazis, Jews, or any of the other people involved. It was just people who did horrible things to other people. As far as I know it could've been ethnic Poles like myself who did it to other poles just because they could.
So without outright saying it, it very much sold the "it could happen here" idea and the kinds of terrible things people are capable of doing to other people.
Back well before I was born, my mother and her family made a few trips to visit relatives in Poland.
Frankly, she probably has enough material about those trips that she could write a book, or at very least a couple of solid blog posts about those trips, with the cold war in full swing and being able to compare and contrast their life in America with that behind the iron curtain.
But among the things that affected her most deeply from those trips was visiting Auschwitz.
She never exactly sat me and my sister down to give us a Holocaust talk or anything like that, but we got little bits and pieces of information dropped on us from time to time.
I don't think this was fully intentional on her part but whenever she talked about it, she was always a little light on context. The "where" was obviously Poland, at least for the camp she visited. Never really went into when it all happened, again it was obviously somewhere in the past, but no mention of WWII, it could have been in the recent past just before so visited, it could have been 200 years ago.
And most importantly, no mention of the who or why. No mention of Germans, Nazis, Jews, or any of the other people involved. It was just people who did horrible things to other people. As far as I know it could've been ethnic Poles like myself who did it to other poles just because they could.
So without outright saying it, it very much sold the "it could happen here" idea and the kinds of terrible things people are capable of doing to other people.