Places where atrocities have been committed develop an idyllic serenity after some time. Travelling through northern France, one is reminded of WW I by the graveyards (simple wooden crosses for the German soldiers, white stone for the other soldiers) and monuments along the road.
But the land where the trenches were dug is there, used by farmers, and only through its' silence does one experience the gruesome scenes that this peaceful countryside has witnessed.
The former deathcamp Auschwitz is also such a site.

I take it that you know the facts of the deliberate and planned extermination of about six million Jews during WW II. I am not going to give any information on this issue as such. What you will get are some personal impressions of my visit to this place.

In a time when there are still people who for ideological, political or religious reasons deny that this killing of one people has taken place, it is right to use the liberty given by the museum to take pictures everywhere and to use every possible way to tell people of these happenings.

I do not deliberately seek to visit memorials of wars. I have never visited the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam. There are already so many explicit and mostly implicit memorials of WW II and the fate of the Jews in Amsterdam that I do not feel that I need to look for more. Also, I never felt any affinity with the business around Anne Frank's diary.

When I was a kid, our teacher told the basics of the story and also reported her stating that despite the crual things that were done to her and her people, she still believed that people where basically good. That idea which is shared by so many, but small as I was I thought it to be nonsense.

Places like Anne Frank's "Het Achterhuis" or Auschwitz, when converted into a museum tend to become sterile and hermetic. Unlike a memorial along the road or on a city square, the museal character tends to freeze the historical happening in time, place and circumstances.

We become purely spectators and the historical facts loose any relation with us. We think some special and unique genius was at work, helped by special circumstances and people who were predisposed, maybe predestined for their role in history. It were Hitlers willing servants (Goldhagen); we could not have done such a thing.

Auschwitz-I is deceiving. It is an extension of a former Polish Army place. The stone houses where fitted with a second floor in order to accommodate the number of inhabitants. It looks as a very decent place to be. The deathwall and the gaschamber/crematorium give it its subversive bite.

Luckily, the banality of evil (Hannah Arendt) brings it all back to us. For it was the decent white collar worker Eichmann who managed the whole business. A man who looks like the perfect neighbour and whom you would have trusted to take care of your plants and post when on holiday.

Despite the exhibition with the facts in Auschwitz-I, it is too organized and clean-cut. The reality of the deathcamp is present in the way the great works of art are present in the museum.

The deathcamp Auschwitz Birkenau is more subtle in its contrast between serenity and cruelty, and the effect is more devastating.

Birkenau covers a large area and shows its function and functionality right away -- the railway going through the entrance building (no "Arbeit macht Frei" / "Labour liberates" on this gate!) with the huge unloading platform behind and the rows of smokestacks of the stoves in the wooden barns where people lived.

Looked at from behind the barbed wire that encircles the quarantine camp, these brick chimneys form a strange testimony to life and destruction. It is all that is left over from what also used to be a daily life for so many people -- a daily life under the knowledge that it most likely would end sooner or later at this spot. It becomes an impertinence to walk through the remaining stables in the quarantine camp: one feels one is trespassing on the private life of people who cannot defend their last bit of private space anymore.

For most Jews deportation to Auschwitz and to the other deathcamps such as Sobibor and Treblinka meant instant death. The Nazi's even did not take the trouble to register their names (no wonder people can just deny it all happened).

After walking around the vast space of Birkenau (turn left through the gate at the end of the quarantine camp) I came to the area where additional gas chambers and crematoria were build.

Here the serenity of the present and the cruelty of the past take your breath away. What looks like a nice pond under the trees is in reality a dump for the ashes of the burnt bodies. In this area under the trees Jews waited for their turn in the gaschambers when the ovens could not cope with the supply. People have waited here knowingly for their turn to get killed.

Seeing the ruins of the gaschambers which the nazis had left, the peacefulness and the colours of the camp at present seemed to be illegitimate. Colour makes the cruelty palatable. It makes nice pictures of cruel happenings. Therefor I shot the pictures around chambers 2 & 3 in black and white.

That night, I lay awake for some seeing how people arrive at the railway platform and are immediately walked to the gaschambers.

Further Reading:

Information on the Auschwitz-Museum

Abel Herzberg: Tweestromenland -- Dagboek uit Bergen-Belsen
Diary of a Dutch Jewish lawyer who survived the KZ-Lager Bergen Belsen. I am not sure whether this book, or any other of his writings about his experiences have been translated into English.