Arnold Schwarzenegger will "never" forget the emotional impact of visiting Auschwitz.
Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks out on anti-semitism
The 75-year-old bodybuilder-turned-Hollywood star paid a visit to the Polish concentration camp - where more than one million Jewish people and other minority groups were tortured and killed between 1940 and 1945 - and admitted that the experience was "heavier" than any exercise he had ever undertaken.
Speaking in a video posted to his official YouTube channel, he said: "When you walk through a place like Auschwitz, you feel a tremendous weight. There are reminders everywhere of the horrors that happened there. Let me tell you something. The weight on your back hits ya heavier than a squat I've ever done, and it never goes away."
The 'Terminator' star went on to question anyone who holds negative beliefs about someone based solely on their religion, gender, or orientation before claiming that the Nazis - who operated thousands of concentration camps during the Holocaust and killed approximately six million Jewish people - and those who sympathise with them had been "lied to" and called discrimination the "path of the weak."
He added: "If you've heard some conspiracies about Jewish people, or people of any race, or gender, or orientation, and thought, 'That makes sense to me.'
"I want to talk to you if you found yourself thinking about anyone is inferior and out to get you because of their religion or the color of their skin or their gender. I don't know the road that has brought you here, but I've seen enough people throw away their futures for hateful beliefs. So, I want to speak to you before you find your regrets on the end of the path. Besides the guilt and the injuries, they felt like losers. Not only because they lost the war, but also because fell for a horrible, loser ideology.
"They were lied to and misled into a path that ended in misery...they bought into the idea that the only way to make their lives better was to make other lives worse …. It breaks you … it is the path of the weak … there has never been a successful movement based on hate.
"Your mind and your character are no different than your body and your muscles," Schwarzenegger insisted. "If you want to grow as a person, you really have to make friends with pain. Embrace the discomfort, enjoy the struggle.
" You have two paths in front of you right now. One of them is going to be the harder one today. It's going to be downright painful. You will have to force your brain to think in new ways. You may lose some friends who want to hold onto their weak beliefs, but as you pull yourself away from that anger and that hate, eventually, you will start to feel empowered. You will realize you have the greatest power of all -- the power to change your own life. You will be stronger than you've ever known."
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