photo #8537004

1. It was my grandmother who was a Holocaust survivor, a subject that deserves a thread of its own, so I won’t be expanding on it much here. After the war, when she was rescued by American forces, she eventually married and had children. She made a conscious effort to ensure her children were well informed about what she and so many others had endured. She even took them to visit Auschwitz at a very young age, multiple times. The experience had a profound effect on her children, one of whom, of course, is my parent. But one thing stood out above all else, and that's the smell they encountered when walking through Auschwitz. Keep in mind this was the late 1960s and early 1970s, nearly two decades after the war had ended, and yet the smell was still overwhelming. It was the smell of death... burnt flesh, decay, the remnants of mass murder, a reminder that the atrocities committed there could never be erased. The following images are very disturbing, but necessary to illustrate the point and explain why such a smell was present at Auschwitz.. This is why: