Birkenau - part 2

_{Part one here.}

Yesterday I published the first set of pictures from Birkenau, and left only vague descriptions about the day, today I'm gonna go a bit more in-depth about the experience. I mentioned the word surreal in the previous post, and that is how I would describe the overall experience in Auschwitz-Birkenau if I only had to use one word, but luckily I don't.

I know that horrible things happened in this place, and in other concentration camps around Europe, I've read about it in history lessons, and seen numerous documents. I've always been very interested in everything surrounding Auschwitz, mostly from a psychological point of view. I know a lot about the place, and the exception is that it's going to be a really horrible experience to visit, but it didn't feel like that to me. I'm going to be completely honest in telling what I felt, because that is what I do, regardless of how you might view me after.

I'm not a very sensitive person when it comes to things I have no personal contact to. Anything that happened to people in Auschwitz, doesn't faze me like it might some others because for example their religious background. What bothered me about the place, the time of the visit and the people there with me, was that it was all too nice. It was distracting. It was a nice sunny day, the grass was green, I was there with people I'd been having fun for a few days already, and there were other happy tourists all around. I've felt a million times sadder while photographing a beautiful sunset alone in a tropical beach somewhere in the world. How fucked up is that?

The buildings are still there, the fences are still these, the horrific slaughterings happened, but it's so surreal because what we see now, is so different for what it actually was. Yeah the sun might have shone too, but there would have been no grass, the ground would have been covered in mud and faeces, there would have been people in various stages of horrible health and wounds all over, the air would have been filled with the smell of burning bodies and excrement.

It's impossible to really imagine what it was like when you have never had any experience that would even remotely resemble it. Think about how insane it is that you can't even really imagine some of the horrors that happened here, yet one human did that to another, in real life, in close contact. Not a push of a button to drop a bomb, but up close and personal.

Shot with the Fujifilm X100F.