While she has all the reasons to be happy for her well-received and very successful ongoing Prismatic World Tour, Katy Perry got a downer on February 25 when she visited the Auschwitz, the infamous World War II Nazi German death camp in southern Poland.
The Auschwitz Nazi death camp has come to symbolize the Holocaust. It was where German strongman Adolf Hitler carried out his genocide plan against the European Jews called as the ‘Final Solution,’ notes MSN Entertainment from an AFP report.
Katy Perry said that she felt her heart very heavy upon seeing the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. She echoed the call of almost everyone who has paid a visit to the infamous place to be reminded of the cry of despair and warning to humanity.
She also explained in the caption that it is the same camp where the Nazi murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children mainly Jews from various European countries from 1940 to 1945.
She also ended her Instagram post by quoting George Santayana that said that the one does not remember history is bound to live it through again.
The pop singer expressed her sentiment on her Instagram account that also included a photo of the camp during her visit there on Wednesday showing barbed-wire fences and red brick buildings.
The visit to the death camp of the 30-year-old singer came one day after performing at the Krakow Arena in Poland as part of her 12-month Prismatic World Tour ending in May 2015.
Katy resumed her World Tour after her highly-publicized and widely-lauded performance during the halftime of Superbowl 2015 on February 1, where she drew rave reviews from fans and music experts, reinforcing her status as today’s pop princess.
A sad piece of history
The German death camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau was operated by German Nazis in the occupied southern Polish town of Oswiecim between 1940 and January 1945, just before World War II ended.
Many have dubbed Hitler’s final solution as the Holocaust. Last January marked the 70th year after the liberation of the camp from the German Nazis. To mark the event, a number of elderly survivors returned to the Auschwitz camp where they all joined the call and urge the world never to forget one of history’s worst atrocities.
The death camp has held more than 1.3 million people for nearly five years, more than 80% of them are Jewish prisoners. Soviet prisoners of war were also detained in the camp and so were homosexuals. Most of them perished either in the gas chamber, through starvation, or diseases.
Polish historians estimate that up to 150,000 ethnic Poles were also held captive at the Auschwitz death camp. They were used as slave laborers and more than half of them died at the camp as well.