Final post and set of photos from visiting Auschwitz a week ago. Parts 1 and 2 were from the Birkenau side, and here is what I already posted earlier from Auschwitz I.
This part of photos are from Auschwitz I too, and it's where the actual museum part of Auschwitz is. We were taken on a guided tour around the ground and inside many of the buildings. On most places you could take photographs, there were only a few rooms where it was forbidden to document what we saw. One of the reasons being that it's illegal (or really poor taste/disrespectful) to photograph human remains. No, we didn't see body parts per se, but something that for me, was the most disturbing thing I saw; human hair.
Piles and piles of, mostly females, hair. Not a little clump that is stuck on the shower drain, but hair from thousands of people. Nazis didn't want to waste anything, so even hair was cut off from all the prisoners before their death, to be later shipped to Germany and made into fabric. The hair was the most tangible proof of the killings that is to this day, present in Auschwitz I. Now that I checked, there is actually pictures of it on the official website, if you want to go and look.
Hair itself, even on a living human, is essentially dead as soon as it grows out of the scalp, but when you think what it represents displayed here, it's disgusting. It really was quite disturbing to see, and to think of how many people had to die for that amount of hair to be left into a pile. And then to think that what was left there at the end of the war, is only a fraction of how much there was shipped out during the years. Insane.
There were also piles of shoes, sunglasses, luggage, and other personal items left, but the hair was what had the most impact on me, and I wanted to share that bit with you.
Photography with the Fujifilm X100F.
I want to end this Auschwitz picture tour to this photograph of 