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21st February 2017 - A Moving Visit to Terezin, Auschwitz and Birkenau Bob Copeland The President welcomed members to our meeting on 21st
February 2017 and introduced the speaker, Bob Copeland, who gave a moving
photographic account of his visit to the Jewish ghetto and camp at Terezin in
what is now the Czech Republic, the concentration camp at Auschwitz and the
Birkenau death camp in Poland.
Terezin, a small fortress, was turned into a camp by the Gestapo and the nearby
town of Theresienstadt became a Jewish ghetto, which became a transit area for
Jews en route to concentration camps.
By the end of the war around 32,000 people had been processed in the camp
and in 1946 601 bodies were exhumed and reburied in a Memorial Garden.
Auschwitz, originally a Polish army barracks, was a concentration camp and it
was here that Bob was specifically allowed to take photographs in the Museum,
usually forbidden. The extent of the
camp, as it is today, is huge and the photographs covered all aspects of life
and death there. Birkenau was set up specifically for extermination, with
people arriving by train. Around 1.5
million people were murdered in Birkenau until its liberation by Allied forces
in 1945. This moving presentation showed photographs of the ghetto and
camps, both as they are today and as they were during its period of use and is
something that should be seen by everyone. The next meeting is at 10.30 am on 7th March when
Ken Duffy will speak on the Freightliner. |