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RE: Auschwitz - Putting a Face to the Name
This is powerful.
I recently visit Dachau, the camp on which the rest of them were modeled. The feeling of pain and suffering still lingers in the air. I can't imagine how anyone could go and not feel the atrocities.
One line in your poem struck me in particular:
I ate a Twix surreptitiously,
The adjective surreptitiously says so much here. I watched folks at Dachau smiling and taking selfies, posing for their social media accounts and felt that was incredibly disrespectful. This one line, and that word in particular, does a great job of summarizing the feeling of simply being alive and living in the midst of place where so many were not as fortunate.
Yeah, I've seen videos of that stuff as well and I am really proud to say, that out of large group from a conference of bloggers/vloggers, I saw no steeemians exhibiting that type of behavior. I'm really glad I didn't, because I would n'y have been able to stop myself pulling them up over it in quite a forthright way.
Thanks for the compliment on the poem, I felt like that line was the strongest part of the poem, and the thing that elevated it to be something a bit different.
As you express so well, I thought that the adjective 'surreptitiously' was completely apt. It's how I felt snacking while I was at Birkenau, kind of guilty, but I was super hungry as I'd missed breakfast lol.
Anyway, it was a powerful experience and in some ways not a negative one as I feel I learned a lot and it inspired some decent creative work which tells a story, an important story to keep telling.
Thanks for the support and meaningful feedback @mattifer
I've read about these groups of steemians in a few different blog posts. How did you connect with a whole group of steemians all going to the same place? I'm glad that our group was respectful of their surroundings. :-)
And I felt the same way at Dachau. It wasn't a negative experience. I came away slightly different than I arrived, and I have a deeper understanding of why we can't let hate and authority blind us. It's important to stand up before it's too late.
I can't say I did connect with everyone in the 100 or more large group. We were split into 4 or 5 septate groups of around 20 but I was deeply inside my mind the whole time. But we kept walking past the other groups and I saw that everyone was acting in accordance with the tour rules. Lots of pictures being taken, some were chatting but everyone was respectful and none of that 'selfie cheesy grin' Instagram style shenanigans.
Sure, I get that. It changes your outlook somewhat. Awakens you to the importance of embracing compassion as an active mode of behaviour.
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I didn't mean connect on a personal level... I meant how did you find that large of a group of steemians to go do something with in the first place? So far, I've not met a single steemian in person, other than the one who turned me on to steemit in the first place.
Hi @mattifer
I was just re-reading some old posts and I saw I hadn't answered your question .... So long ago now.
This trip to auschwitz was one of the excursions at steemfest 3 in Krakow, which I was very lucky to attend 🙂
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