When thinking about the Holocaust what comes to your mind?

Their stories.

my mother was the sole survivor of family of seven...my father lost his parents and two sisters...three brothers survived

((()))) <~~~ hugs

Sorry if I was out of line.

who would i call cousins, aunts, uncles, and other relatives? Guess I'll never know.

Holocaust Museum with their recordings from survivors..

to ensure that all of their students were aware of what happened in Nazi Germany. Our history classes in general weren't the greatest; unfortunately very little was taught of the 1900s or of world history. But learning about Hitler and the Holocaust was the exception. We were taught deeply and repeatedly about what happened and how it happened; about the responsibility of ordinary people to stop such great evil from taking over.

This was in the 1970s.

Visit to Dachau concentration camp and seeing the ovens and "Arbeit Macht Frei" in the gates. The synagogue in Augsburg that was in its pristine state of destruction since the Thirties. The "souvenirs" of the Third Reich hidden in the basement of a home in Wechsler (Third Reich dagger, medals, silhouette of Hitler).

The Holocaust became real to me.

The first thing that comes to mind is a gentleman who lived near us when I was a little boy. He was a survivor of the death camps. He was a kind and gentle person, who gave my siblings and I gifts, and spent time talking with us. His entire family died in those death camps. We still have some of those gifts, many decades later. I have a fairly clear picture of him in my mind, including the way that he walked. But most of all, his kindness.

I also think of the horror stories that relatives who fought in WW2 shared with us.

As a result of these, I have read books and watched documentaries about this topic. And I tend to process it in terms of my neighbor who endured and survived, and my relatives who fought in the war.

The first thing that came to mind was the Warsaw uprising/siege, and the incredible strength of those people, armed only with molotov cocktails and a handful of other weapons keeping the mighty wehrmacht at bay for weeks.

The next thing that comes to mind is my visit to the Holocaust Museum here in Dallas. To get into the museum you had to walk through one of the boxcars. It was one of the most emotional things I can recall experiencing. Standing in that boxcar, knowing what the transports were like, with people crammed in, terrified and helpless.... the pain and anguish that hung in that space was indescribable, even after 60 years.

The last thing is that we are rapidly approaching a time when there will be no living witnesses/survivors and that frightens me. The deniers are still out there, stronger and more vile than ever.

of ancestors I never knew in countries I've never seen.

The sections about the concentration/death camps made my head explode. I was probably somewhere around 9 or 10 when I started looking through the books.

But it was the PHOTOS that I will always remember. The skeletal people being liberated, the piles of bodies. Picture after picture after picture, seared into your forever memory. "How can people be so evil? What happened? It must never happen again" those are the thoughts I recall having.

All the people who think torture photos should not be released are just plain wrong. You can read about the horrors of Auschwitz, but nothing replaces SEEING the horror of Auschwitz. The memory of the victims is HONORED by showing the world what actually happened to them, so that it cannot be buried or forgotten and so that what happened to them will not happen to another.

The evidence of the photos that we have all seen is also what makes it easy to give Holocaust deniers the ridicule that they deserve as they try to rewrite history.

The lessons to be taken here are obvious.

and my uncle's parents (he married into the family). and what my grandma used to tell me (she was a teenager at the end of the war) and though she was Catholic, my grandma felt very strongly that we learn what happened.


it's kind of the reason i'm a historian...

Whether this comes from a vivid imagination inspired by the old newsreels of the camps or from a past life memory, "Arbeit Macht Frei" is rather ominous to me.

although those are very powerful and haunting and indescribably sad.

No, it was the piles of gold teeth, or glasses, or hair or suitcases, etc. that got to me. I think that truly showed the scale of the slaughter.

When I went to the Dachau facility, seeing the actual ovens was something that I will never forget.

The hellish industriousness of it all.

I have never forgotten it.

who lost loved ones in concentration camps and wore scars for the rest of their lives from their experiences in concentration camps.