Vught

I visited an old concentration camp in Vught in October. The reason for my visit was research, mostly; we were working on “war” in Photo Reportage and I wanted to know more about the Dutch experience. Of which I did not know much; Anne Frank, mostly, and some old photos from the German occupation time, but that’s it.

It was hard to get to Vught. It was raining and the place is not easily reachable by public transportation. Sort of makes sense, one does not expect to find a concentration camp in a city center. Nowadays there is a prison next to the old camp.

The old guys who took care of the camp explained many things to me, mostly in very fast Dutch which I could not follow very well. Seems the camp also had a lot of kids living in there. There was a memorial and also a wall where kids these days leave their greetings.

The place was mostly deserted. I walked around, read the exhibition materials and made some photos. Strangely Vught had no large effect on me; it was not as scary or desolate as Terezin was (I visited Terezin a few years ago when I was in Prague and got almost physically ill). Maybe it was because many of the objects were new and as such somehow fake. I understand why they had rebuilt the barrack bunk beds and the tables, but still.

There were people coming out of the prison when I left. Seemed to be women and kids, I guess they were visiting their family members. I wonder how weird it feels to sit in a prison which is basically an old concentration camp.

September

September was a month of getting reacquainted with the Academy after the summer, with the Netherlands after spending two months away, and with life mostly alone after hanging with H and the relatives for most of the time. We began the new work/schoolyear apart, and that is how it will be for the whole year; H’s job is in Sweden, I am in the Netherlands and my friends and family are in Finland.

It will not be easy.

What small things happened in my life: I got new glasses after 10 years, planned a trip to Japan for November, followed the rocky start of the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, followed the American election battles and felt ashamed for Sarah Palin (a quote from someone wise: “…it’s as though there’s this massive blob of embarrassment that someone should be feeling but they’re not, so it attaches to you, the watcher. I could never watch “I Love Lucy” for this reason: Lucy wasn’t embarrassed, so by some sort of Law of Conservation of Shame, I had to be.”), watched the International Space Station pass over me, drank too much beer with the other foreign students and studied.

It was a weird month because I only read two books, The Complete Stories by Isaac Asimov (very good science fiction, but I for some reason never much cared for Asimov’s robotics) and Truth and Consequences by Alison Luria. I’ve noticed that my attention span is getting noticeably shorter; it is now easier for me to relax in front of the TV’s stupid sitcoms than by reading a good book. Worrisome.