Untitled - Undeservedly So

There is something disgustingly inappropriate about the perverse curiosity of mankind. What rational specie would travel distant lengths to entertain itself with visits to locations of its own demise?

The camps at Auschwitz are hollow and forlorn. They sit in deep silence, aging with a heavy conscious. Their modern burden is to pose in stature as curious onlookers seek an answer to the question of how. The pointed barbs on the wire fence perimeters have started to oxidize and soften, making them more approachable than their prior form. The metal turnbuckles keeping taunt the wired strands are disjointed and unmovable. The wooden guard posts are losing slates and are weathered to a tint which matches the heaven sky on a gloomy day.

The large field camp of Birkenau sits even more silent than its brethren 3km away. The open field still littered with the remains of the crudely constructed cabin shacks which supplied refuge to inhabitants from the storm of the world around them. As if to mark graves of those who parished, the chimneys from the domiciles still stand. Inside the stacks are black and colored with soot that traps the souls of those who were fuel for its creation.

A set of parallel locomotive tracks runs the length of the camp. They start at hells gate and continue to the far fence line where scaling burms are built out of the remains of those piled beneath. The tracks pass a loading dock about halfway through where sorting and culling of the disposable cargo was off loaded. The well worn steel looks sleepy as if even it needs a break from the scrupulous work required by the generation past.

The grass is still green and the trees still grow; what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.