Pictures

After hearing in the film that someone was shocked by how little was left of Eichman, I decided to do some research on the ashes of the Jews in an attempt to achieve some scale. In doing so I came across many other pictures that I found disturbing and shocking for other reasons. Personally I have been fairly unshaken by the books we have read. Somehow the words and the places invoke different images and emotional responses when they are in textual form and I have found that images, particularly photographs as they are the most realistic, are much more emotionally distressing to me. Even as I typed "Concentration camp ashes" into Google, I had to just emotionally brace myself for the worst. I had no idea what I would see.

Here are some of the ashes that I found, if you have the heart to look:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3233/2513639889_b2890ee58d.jpg

http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Buchenwald/images_Smith/ashes.jpg

One interesting observation is that in Maus, page 157, Spiegelman draws Auschwitz. Take a gander at this image:

I never realized how accurate this image was until I saw this picture. It's from almost the exact same perspective, except there are a truck and SS soldiers present. The similarity is eery.

Also for me as a reader I never broadened my vision past the building the narrator was living in. To see all the buildings together was an experience for me, that helped me in extrapolating the story beyond a single event and person and onto all the people in the concentration camps.

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/Auschwitz/Arial.jpg

And in looking at all these images, I came across blogs which had the whole shebang. Here are two such blogs:

edp.org/Germany/Dachau.html

www.studioq.com/blog/?cat=25

I hope these images allow you to see what we have been reading about, and feel a little something more in your heart.