"Arbeit macht frei" "Work Will Set You Free" - Auschwitz-Birkenau

Auschwitz, Poland - September 2012. Gathered by a sense of human failing, curiousity or simple morbidity. We were from 'round the world. Some American, Canadian, some Chinese, Swiss, Saudi and still others from any country you can imagine. We were maybe seventeen or eighteen tourists all told. All of us lumped into an English language tour.

Solemn. We followed a guide. We walked the corridors, climbed the same echoing stairs and listened to the heinous, the improbable, the impossible; the truth. I did not use the camera. It used me. The lens was drawn to open spaces out of windows. The grounds. The spaces that forlorn eyes might have looked out upon. Inside there were statistics. Maps, numbers, a list of ethnic groups. 

Then it all changed when we came to an exhibt of human hair piled high behind a large glass pane and the next, a display bolts and bolts of cloth woven from locks shorn from the heads of those soon to be victims. 

That is what stopped me.  

I did not last the tour. 

It finished me.

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