Never forget

I was remembering something really sad today. Something really quite awful.

You see I live in a region of France that was extremely affected by the second world war. Like it wasn't just occupied, it was actually taken over and made part of Germany. Young men were forced to join the German army or watch as their whole families were sent off to prison camps. The "Malgré Nous" they were called.

And so when I was fifteen years old my school decided that some of the older classes should go to see Stutthof, because we were all studying the war, and because we lived so close. Stutthof is a concentration camp.

It was the most horrible place I've ever been to. And the worst thing is that you don't realise it at first. You don't realise that you are standing in a place were so many people have died. It seemed like a regular school outing.

I think we all realised it wasn't at different points. I think we all realised where we actually were at different places in the camp. Different triggers for everyone.

The full horrible nature of what I was seeing became clear to me when I saw the Gallows at the top of the camp. They had placed it there so that the random person they decided to hang on the morning of every day would be seen by all the prisoners.

For others it was the crematorium, or the little 2m square rooms that would be crammed full with twenty people, or the room where the experiments took place. I think most people understood when they saw the pictures in the museum though.

I'm not sure why I thought about this today, or why I'm even talking about it. Maybe because we all need to remember every now again, to remind ourselves that those horrible things really happened, and not far away either. No. They happened here.

Never forget.