A fraction of impact… – TheFledglingPhotographer

So… more than the 20 tons of human hair some still braided and knotted…

…more than the enormous piles of shoes or mangled glasses frames or combs and shaving cream brushes…

…more than the photographs or the train cars or the barracks…

…I see the scratches on the walls of the gas chamber. Because I know they went in without any of these things and still made a mark on the world that still survives today.

This is Auschwitz.

I crossed 10,000 photographs yesterday since I left the country a month and a day ago. And I can only hope that any one of those images creates a fraction of the impact of a scratch on a wall in a concrete room in southern Poland.

Still, besides this initial photograph, I am going to just post a few images completely unedited. Because these things don’t need me to make them all “dramatic” with black and white and such… to be there and experience a walk through such a place. I just don’t know how it could be more intense or impactful.

But we were not alone. And for that, I find relief. I hope many of the German and Polish and Hungarian and Russian school children and adults around us yesterday grasp the weight of the things they were seeing yesterday.

The people who now inhabit the area, though, life is as it is anywhere else in Europe.

That was the past to never forget. This is Krakow and a present and a future…