I am sure many people of my age would agree when I say that it is impossible to shed the sense of remoteness that someone of my age holds towards the holacaust. Despite the fact that these crimes were committed in living memory and that footage and photographs still show the realities of what happened, the disasters of the second world war seem so far removed from real 21st century life, that they become unrealistic and obscure to the modern eye. It's impossible to feel the pain and terror even in a secondary sense - it's all so unreal. So we walked around the museums and gradually allowed that wanted, unwanted, sickening sensation to crystallise inside us.
I don't feel any need or desire to write about the camps. We have all read about them before and surely in this rare case, information has to be real and tangiable. A few words on a computer screen just won't do.. I ask you, though, to picture just one thing - A room in the museum containing just short of 2 tons of human hair, removed from ladies after death by Cyklone-B and sold to textile industires for cloth manufacture. It is a wrenching, sickening sight and from within the huge jumble of locks I could hear crying and screaming, whilst deep inside an ear that nestles somewhere between my heart and my stomach could not only hear, but feel, smell and taste the horror, the absurdity, the pure undignified fear and totally unrefracted cruelty, which left one long and perfect plait, so carefully tied by a young girl one morning, lying in a scraggly, hairy bed of death.