Genocide never stops, racism and xenophobia never stops, hatred never stops and so war will never stop.
Auschwitz is a strange place. For the obvious reasons when you're there you can't fathom what was going through people's minds to come up with such a horrendous idea. What drove them on and why and how on earth they managed it all (in that sense it's impressive but in the worst possible way). Efficiently of the most horrible manner, a truly effective slaughterhouse of extreme measures.
You can't fathom the despair and pain of the people innocently caught up in it, either being led to their death in the gas chambers or just barely surviving freezing, starving, diseased and a hair's breadth away from being shot, tortured, experimented on or being sent themselves to the gas chambers.
You can be there all day and never take it all in and never read everything or see everything and all the way you've no idea how to describe how it feels to be there knowing what went on.
But then there's the other side of it. Disneyland for the Holocaust. Everybody in, make sure you get your selfies with the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, make sure you get a filtered photo of the train tracks with the famous gate tower building in the background and definitely make sure you let your kids run around playing and wear innappropriate clothing too (one woman with Party Slut on her t-shirt and a bloke with 'if you're not here to party then feck off' on his back, I'm looking at you).
I also feel awful because I'm likely going back to Poland in March and I want to go back to Auschwitz (it sounds odd to say you want to go once, let alone twice) because I didn't do the guided tour so didn't see the room with the shoes, the hair or any of the stuff you know Auschwitz for as a tourist. I think that probably makes me a bad person but I've also got an insane hunger for being miserable and seeing miserable stuff so it definitely appeals to the depressed side of me.
I just wish we could take all the people who openly spread hate (especially idly and carelessly on social media or by disguising it under the words of a God) and send them there for the day and not let them out until they realise what hate can actually do and educate them on how bad we can actually be as a species.
My heart definitely ached and I felt utterly sick when stood next to the gas chamber ruins and I read the sign 'here lies the remains of 500,000 people, please be respectful'.
What the feck are we as people to allow that to happen, really?