Entering Hell

 It’s such a difficult topic to write about; so difficult to express – in words – the awful feelings, the twisted aesthetic, the smouldering evil … (sighs) … you actually question your own veracity: were there really such evil people? Can I believe that they actually … ? Was there really a plausible reason why … ?

It’s now 13 years since I walked through the gates of Auschwitz Birkenau and, I have to admit, the questions – as above, and many more – still, for the most part, remain unanswered.

But I don’t want to be trite: of course the Holocaust happened; estimates suggest around 6,000,000 Jews were exterminated during the Shoah – and that is an estimate: the Einsatzgruppen undertook mass shootings which were largely undocumented; small children, some elderly, or people added ‘ad hoc’ to the transports were often omitted from deportation lists.

I think one of the problems we have in truly coming to terms with the evil inflicted – mankind upon mankind – during the Holocaust, is the shear scope of it! The numbers are truly unfathomable. Who can actually imagine what a group of 6,000,000 people looks like? What do you equate it too? I mean, it’s akin to the entire population of Scotland; or twice the population of Wales. It’s like trying to count the stars in the sky, its practically inconceivable.

Yet, while anyone of us would consider attempting to count up to 6,000,000 a hopeless task, the Nazi’s did not: they recorded the incremental ‘gains’ achieved by their almost mechanistic process of killing and disposing of all those they gathered to their death camps from all over Europe; recording their owns crimes for the benefit of posterity. While the lists of those human beings culled by the Nazis are incomplete, records are still held in various international archives. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum holds many of the surviving records of those transported too – and subsequently murdered by - the Nazi regime.

However, as I said, I don’t want to be trite. It’s a difficult subject to write about, and I worry that my own uninstructed presentations might belittle, undermine or otherwise disparage or downplay  – as I said before - the almost inconceivable enormity of the Holocaust.

Suffice to say that, as I walked through the camp gate - beneath the steel scrollwork which informed “Arbeit Macht Frei (work sets you free) -my mood sank. I knew I was entering Hell. It’s one of those experiences which are almost impossible to express. You have to be there. You have to see it for yourself.

I’ll let some of my pictures speak for me. But, remember, the Auschwitz I visited has been sanitised from the Death Camp which British, American and Russian troops came upon as they tried to clear Europe of the foul, Nazi sickness. Even now though, the pall of those atrocities seems still to cling to the fabric of the place. And it can’t be denied. Not ever.