Auschwitz is a place that should not be. A thing that should only exist in nightmares. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The place, and the events that transpired there, are too terrible to contemplate. The horrors beyond imagining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And yet it is<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Terribly soul-crushingly real. Refusing to fade into mist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were moments today I\u2019ll likely remember forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I was just a visitor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We booked admission in November, once we\u2019d decided to visit Krakow. Even well in advance there were no English tour slots available, so we booked individual entry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A 90 minute bus trip from the Krakow central bus depot and we joined the queue, where our tickets and IDs were checked and we were ushered through a metal detector.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We stopped at the bookshop and bought the guidebook and entered the compound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I may have taken a dozen steps before I felt tears on my cheeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we emerged from the last building dark had fallen. The camp was eerily empty – I don\u2019t think we saw anyone as we made our way to the exit. Any return buses had long since departed, so we walked through the freezing dark to the O\u015bwi\u0119cim train station.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I chose to leave my camera at the hotel, and we took very few pictures. The place deserved our full presence and attention, without the comforting intermediation of a camera lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So we looked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We saw<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And we will remember. We have no choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n 22-December<\/p>\n\n\n\n We left Krakow and met up with friends in Switzerland, spending most of a week between Basel and Zurich before returning to London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m finishing this entry over a week later, and I still<\/em> can\u2019t put words to the thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I\u2019ll borrow some from the entry marker:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Genocide presents us with an image so appalling that it can be damaging even to look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But we know we must look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We know that repressing memory, willed forgetting, is perhaps the greatest danger we face as a species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If we want to remain fully human, we have no choice but to confront and remember the past, to learn, and to act on what we’ve learned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Steven Spielberg’s RIGHTEOUS PERSONS FOUNDATION<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 12-December As I write this, Dawnise and I are a train back to Krakow. We spent most of the day at Auschwitz. I can\u2019t yet put words to the thing. Deciding to visit was very much in the category of \u201cthings we feel compelled do as an adult\u201d not \u201cthings we want to do.\u201d And … Continue reading “The Actual Stuff of Nightmares”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-the-universe-and-everything"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2105"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2297,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2105\/revisions\/2297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"