Different reactions

People can have different reactions to different experiences. That's what makes us all human. That's what makes us all different. But I cannot understand how someone could make crude jokes out of the intense suffering and extremity of cruelty that occurred in a concentration camp.

Maybe I'm too serious or uptight, and should probably dismiss it all as simple foolishness and joke-making for the fun of it (at least I should hope so...). But comparing a concentration camp to a diet camp or the gas chambers to a spa...?

There is satire, there is poking fun. And then there is a level of humour that is so insensitive and of poor taste that it completely trivialises the pain and suffering of countless many Jews, Roma, homosexuals, political objectors and those deemed to be "misfits" by the Nazi regime.

Auschwitz, Birken-Hausen, Struthof... these are undoubtedly infamous names of places in history where horrendous amounts of pain were inflicted-- the effects of which still linger on in the memories of survivors and their relatives. But these places also stand symbolically as a reminder that till this day, decades after the world leaders got together, shook their heads in unison and promised "never again", the same kind of atrocities continued to occur, and still are occurring.

Last time I visited a concentration camp [LINK HERE], I was moved close to tears by my experience. In the narrow, gloomy hallways, in the gaschambers in which a sickly and deathly air seemed to hang thick after all these decades, on the walls of torture rooms and "medical labs ", I felt the ghosts of history come alive and haunt me.

Pictures, writings, shoes, teeth... rusted barbed fences, wind-swept barrack walls, and the open excavation of a quarry dug out by the inmates... All remnants and memories, painful and sordid, that till today still stand as indelible marks of the collective suffering, collective shame and collective guilt of entire nations, of the entire human race, which cannot and can never be erased.
It was a feeling of oppression, of gagging, of silence so intense I have only felt it in the face of watching family and close friends hopelessly suffer and slowly die from cancer... But the concentration camp bears the souls and innocence of so many who needlessly died because of prejudice, because of hatred, because someone was born the way they were born...

And someone actually questioned why people were standing there and weeping, even though they were not even Jewish. A human being's suffering and pain inflicted intentionally by another fellow human being who is acting under the spell of pure malice, and perhaps even out of joy, is reason enough to weep. Whatever race you are, and however remote you are to the time, place and people who bore the brunt of tyranny and oppression. Is not human sympathy and human compassion for the pain of others what distinguishes us from uncivilised beasts?

But this is just my reaction. Other people may have other reactions. And they are no less correct or wrong compared to mine.