Scale, smell, and order: Auschwitz stretches reason, and defies it, too. It is a grid of barracks, crematoria ruins, and shooting sites. And green fields. Fields of nothingness and excess. To the victims: I am exhausted from thinking about what happened to you here and there. In "My Place/Meine Ortschaft", Peter Weiss wrote about the trains, the arteries of death, and their destination: "At the station of Auschwitz the goods trains clank. Locomotive whistles and lumbering smoke. Buffers that rattle up against each other. The air full of misty rain, the paths softened, the trees bare and damp. Soot-blackened factories, surrounded by barbed wire and walls. Wooden carts grind by drawn by thin horses, the peasant shrouded in silence, the colour of earth. Old women on the paths, wrapped in shawls, carrying bundles. Further off in the fields single farmsteads, bushes and poplars. Everything dismal and worn to bits. Forever the trains up above on the rail embankment, slowly rolling backwards and forwards, barred airholes in the wagons. Sidings lead further, to the barracks, and still further, over barren fields to the end of the world".Friday, July 27, 2007
to, and from, Auschwitz
Scale, smell, and order: Auschwitz stretches reason, and defies it, too. It is a grid of barracks, crematoria ruins, and shooting sites. And green fields. Fields of nothingness and excess. To the victims: I am exhausted from thinking about what happened to you here and there. In "My Place/Meine Ortschaft", Peter Weiss wrote about the trains, the arteries of death, and their destination: "At the station of Auschwitz the goods trains clank. Locomotive whistles and lumbering smoke. Buffers that rattle up against each other. The air full of misty rain, the paths softened, the trees bare and damp. Soot-blackened factories, surrounded by barbed wire and walls. Wooden carts grind by drawn by thin horses, the peasant shrouded in silence, the colour of earth. Old women on the paths, wrapped in shawls, carrying bundles. Further off in the fields single farmsteads, bushes and poplars. Everything dismal and worn to bits. Forever the trains up above on the rail embankment, slowly rolling backwards and forwards, barred airholes in the wagons. Sidings lead further, to the barracks, and still further, over barren fields to the end of the world".
