Auschwitz

[crystaleyesd]

As many of you know, I've been in Poland this week, and I took the opportunity to go on a sort of pilgrimage to Auschwitz, because the holocaust and especially the camps is something that fascinates and horrors me simultaneously. I'd been before, 2 years ago, but on a swelteringly hot afternoon in July when the tour groups were out in their hundreds and I felt like I was at a kind of amusement park. It was better when the sun began to set behind the trees and the camp glowed in a golden light, but it still felt wrong somehow. I told myself I'd come back in the winter. It was a bitterly cold day and although the snow had mostly melted in Krakow, the countryside was still blanketed in white. It was shrouded in mist; you could barely see a metre in front of you, and the skeletal trees loomed through the fog, while the icy barbed wire seemed to reach up and claw the sky. There was barely anybody there, and it was eerily silent. It felt like death, and it was death. I walked around half in a daze, just imagining what lay below my feet, and the basest level mankind can be reduced to.
It has stayed in my mind all week, and that's good. Today is Holocaust Rememberance Day. We must never forget.

These are my photos; mostly desaturated in PS.