Fragments - Poland, December 2015

In December 2015 I had travelled to Poland to work on a number of locations for my just began work ‘A Wounded Landscape - bearing witness to the Holocaust’.

Amongst these locations was Chelmno and the Rzucho forest. Chelmno was the first of the mass killing centres set up by the Nazis.

The prisoners were mostly Jews but also Soviet prisoners of war and Roma. After being kept overnight in the village, they were herded into vans and driven along the 15 minute journey to the nearby forest.
Along the way, they were gassed in the van.

Then buried in shallow pits.

Nearly 200,000 people were murdered in this single place, the 5th most deadly of the mass killing centres.

When the Nazis dismantled this killing centre they attempted to cover up these murders. Bodies were exhumed, burnt and then, with machines especially constructed for the purpose, the bones of the dead were crushed. The ashes then piled into cloth sacks and dumped in the nearby Warta river.

In 2015, when making work here, along the pathways within the site, seeping up out of the sandy soil, these small white fragments appear.

Bone fragments.

Fragments of people.

I found it almost impossible to make these photographs, knowing what I was looking at, having to focus my lens on. Children, mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, grandparents. But of course I had to, how could I not retell these stories to share with you, to pass on this knowledge.