France – Alsace, April 2016
The Gas Chamber
After 11 hours of travelling, I was searching for a large hole in the rock face. Walking in the driving rain, Hasselblad dripping with water, searching. I hear a bird sing, turn around and there, on a branch, sits the bird. The hole I am looking for directly behind it beyond some trees.
The hole dug out by prisoners, pink granite for the nazi project.
‘The prisoners at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp had a mortality rate of 40%’
I make work here and in the forest surrounding this place.
This concentration camp on French soil.
As the daylight disappears, everything turns blue.
Overnight in the hotel room, camera in its individual segments, drying out on
the hotel towels.
Body, viewfinder, lens, dark slide, back, film insert, bag.
In the restaurant, eating dinner, trying to unsee what I’ve begun to imagine at these places. Early in this 6 year work.
‘The guards vegetable garden fertilised by the ashes of the incinerated prisoners.’
The next morning, in the dark, I am driving back over the snow covered pass to the same concentration camp. The gas chamber. Something catches my eye, I slow down. In the silence, from the trees a deer appears and walks out into the road in front of me, lit by the car headlights. I stop. It stops, turns its head and looks at me, for the briefest moment. I fumble for my camera in my bag on the seat next to me, never taking my eyes off the deer. Then it carries on and disappears back into the forest, my hand still in my bag.
Up the mountain roads, back at the camp, I reach the gas chamber. The dark is fading into light. On the road, in front of the building lies another bird. Quiet, eyes wide open, untouched as if it has simply fallen from the sky. Dead.”
‘The gas chamber was set up to perform experiments on the corpses of 86 Jews who had been transported from Auschwitz and gassed on arrival.’
Of the 52,000 prisoners held at Natzweiler-Struthof and its subcamps, an estimated 22,000 died.
The book of this work, A Wounded Landscape - bearing witness to the Holocaust is still available. Of the 1500 copies we were able to print, about 380 are now left.
