Yesterday I went to Auschwitz, which, not surprisingly, ended up being quite an upsetting day - it was strange though. Not just upsetting because of the terrible history of the site, but also because of the tourism there. One of the first things you read upon entering the museum is that it is not recommended that children under 14 visit the site - but everywhere I went there were young children running around. These strange juxtapositions - the death wall, where so many people were executed became a place for children to place chasey. In the cellars downstairs in Block 11, where the nazis first used the poison they eventually used in the all their gas chambers, a man answered his mobile phone, and chatted away. I saw people getting their photographs taken beside signs, cell blocks and the railway line, as if to say "I was here" in the same manner they might take the same photographs in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum. It was quite surreal - this lightness, as though "just another site of human atrocities" (and I'm quite aware the world isn't lacking in those) alongside a room filled with human hair that the nazis had not yet sold when the camp was liberated. The tins the poison came in, the tangled mess of spectacles culled from the Jews who died there. Such a strange place - and so green. I found it hard to understand that the landscape was so green. I felt that, by rights, it should be utterly barren - or at least that same burnt look of the Australian countryside in the summer. It's hard to even think what to write about Auschwitz - in one of the cell blocks the walls were covered by photographs taken of the prisoners upon arrival. (That is, the prisoners who weren't immediately taken to the gas chambers, which was the fate of the vast majority.) In some of these photographs there was still a kind of fighting hope in the eyes of the prisoners, though mostly just a blank look - the determination not to give anything away. There were even a few photographs of women smiling, as though they hadn't forgotten that that was somehow their function - to smile, to hold onto hope in the face of everything. I watched a film made up of images taken on the day of liberation - watched as the liberated children - under 700 of them - came out in pairs. Mostly in pairs because so many of the survivors were twins, kept alive for medical experiments. Being out in the field at Auschwitz-Birkenau especially it hit home how difficult it would be to work there - whether kept on starvation rations or not. Yesterday the sun was oppressive - just as in winter the extreme cold would equally be a barrier. Like so many other people who have been, I feel that it was important that I did go - but still can't quite fathom it.

I'm still reading Kapuscinski - over the past few days I've read The Soccer War and The Emperor. I'm going to start another one this evening, lie down by the river and read.