Well then! Been on DV a while now and havent used this feature, so was probibly about time i did so! Hmm so whats been happening in my life?

Strasbourg:
School trip to this city on the rhien, on the border of france and germany. Involved much drinking, going out for meals in random french restarants (always much fun, especially when you have a wine coneseur in your group, who can pick the best stuff out!)

We visited a gingerbread factory, did a BORING boattrip round the docks... (two and a half hourse of moving at 3mph in the boat, round crumbling industrial workings, with a tape recording offering forth pearls of wisdom every half an hour...)

Next day we went to the european parlement, had some drama when some girl fainted (she hadnt been eating the silly bint). Then we went off to the kronenburg factory, where we all enjoyed free samples of beer...

Last we went on to a concentration camp. This was the only concentration camp in france, and it was a very sombre experience.

As we approched it up a long winding mountain road it began to snow, big wet grey flakes blanketing the landscape around us like a white shroud. We stepped out of the coach and looked over the camp, double barbed wire fences, electrified, guard towers, low squating huts of concrete and wood, and at the bottom of the camp the blackened chimney of the brooding incinerator.

Passing through the gates i seperated from our group, closing my eyes and just soaking the atmosphere in. It scared me. The fear and dispear were still here, 50 years on and they were still lingering, the vestages of hate.

The gallows. Standing tall, noose swinging gently in the wind. Silloutted against the harshly white mountins, an instrument of death. The orginal gallows where public hangings delighted the nazis. The camp commander smoking a cigar as that rope choaked the life out of jew after jew.

Our group closed up, fighting against the snow and wind to get to the bottom of the camp, down the mountinside. And i couldnt help but think of the prisoners, some forced to stand still for 6 or 7 hours a day in this cold, in one layer of clothing and no shoes...

We entered the incinerator, glad to escape the cold, only to stumble upon the next horror. Squat and black, cast iron- constructed with holes to stoke the coke and coal beneath, and a water tank above to put the heat generated to good use. The heat of burning bodies, the dead pushed into its iron maw, before bursting into flames. The smoke and ash of a broken life gushing from the chimney above. Filling the camp with the oder of death; the black stain of guilt and hatred spreading.

Behind this, four innocent hooks were suspended from the ceiling. Points used for quick, easy hangings. Up to four men at a time could be killed this way, the nazi guards laughing as their necks break- before feeding their bodys the the incinerator a few yards infront.

At the end of the coridoor, an autopsy table. Made of concrete and tiles, slit diagonally so blood could run away, this table stands. The spectre of the nazi doctors, twisting science, killing and maiming to "see what would happen". Ripping humanity apart to see what makes these jews tick, and still the tide of blood grows.

Execution rooms with bullet holes still in the walls, isolation cells- and racks for whipping prisioners till they passed out. I just wanted to cry, but no tears could wash this tide of evil away. The last building was a museum, with pictures, uniforms; evidence of the wrongdoing commited here and across europe. One picture sticks in my imagination here. The autopsy table i had just seen, the table i had just touched, was shown. Four bodys were piled on it, one in two pieces, seathered at the waist, the others mauled and cut- deathly thin men, sightless eyes accusing.

I guess i didnt understand the magnitude with which some people hate.

One thing just blew me away here. Walking into a cell in which hundreds of men and women lost their lives, and on the wall some degenerate has scrawled:

Ben 4 Gemz Y2k2

I dont even know how to express what i felt when i saw that. I could have screamed. After all these people suffered all someone could think about was leaving evidence of crushes. Amongst the corpses and ghosts left behind by the nazis. Im speachless.

The whole visit just left me speachless.