Oświęcim

A few days ago, I visited Auschwitz, the largest of the German concentration camps, for the first time. It was not my first visit to a camp. During high school, we visited Mauthausen in Austria—during a cold and rainy day, the only time I ever saw a German history teacher cry. Dachau, the first major camp that was opened close to my place of birth Munich, followed, also Sachsenhausen near Berlin, and a few smaller subcamps near Landsberg and, unknowingly Gablingen, where I used to swim in a lake that was next to an erased camp, as a teenager. In order to fully understand the heavy load-bearing cylinder, we need to take into consideration the network of violence it grew out of, Speer's Germania project would not have been possible without the stones cut by armies of slave laborers in concentration camps, they were the actual heavy load-bearing bodies, carrying out his architectural vision on their shoulders, crumbling under its weight. Therefore, the heaviness of this place is not merely physical, it transcends materiality, accumulating to something heavier than history herself, I, call it heavy load-bearing modernity—and it belongs to those who perished under its pressure, but we, have it to carry it on.