Here, I sometimes ramble.
Welcome to my occasional travel blog and other miscellany. I’m happy you’re here, and I apologize for the mercurial posting schedule.
Posts
- The green house at Sobibór
- Majdanek, and the weather
- “Here lies a human being”, Treblinka.
- Poland, the storks, and a great Ukrainian poet
- Ostrów Mazowiecka and Commemoration (or the lack thereof)
- Bełżec, and the numbers
- Kazimierz Dolny
- Well. That’s unsettling.
- What is said and seen: Reflections on Auschwitz-Birkenau
- Some caveats before Poland
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The green house at Sobibór
Sobibór is a disquieting place, tethered in the present day to an evolving duty to commemorate the upwards of 180,000 Jewish people who were murdered here. My interest was captured by how unsettlingly close people currently lived to the death camp site. More specifically, by this green house. To say this house has bad vibes is a severe understatement. I knew the house was one of the remaining few traces of the camp before I went. I did not know it was presently occupied by a private owner. That was a startling realization. Why in the hell would anyone chose…
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Majdanek, and the weather
This place seems so entirely other as to be an impossibility. This should be an impossible place. It isn’t, though, right? It’s a well preserved place, yes, and it serves the role of standing in for countless places of horror that mark our shared history, back to the beginning, and aren’t around anymore. There surely aren’t enough sadists to account for the bloody record written on this earth. There are that many people.
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“Here lies a human being”, Treblinka.
Treblinka was the first tour I went on where I saw the camps through the victims. This is strange, I know, but I’m trying for stark honesty in this blog. I have always centred victims in my reading, but that is easier when you can reach for a poem, or a memoir, or a history text at will. At the other places, I was focused on abstractions too much. reblinka I knew more about going in, including stories about some of the people who were killed there. And we had a gift of a tour guide who paused frequently for…
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Poland, the storks, and a great Ukrainian poet
The storks may be my favourite thing about this beautiful country.
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Ostrów Mazowiecka and Commemoration (or the lack thereof)
Poland’s relationship to the Shoah post-war has been, to say the least, complicated and Ostrow Mazowiecka is a *complex* place.
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Bełżec, and the numbers
You can take in the expanse without moving your eyes much if you stand in the right spot. I got caught in the idea that you should not be able to grasp in a one glance a space where this many people were killed, and where their ashes now lay in 33 mass graves.