Gas chamber - Majdanek, Poland

Hans is fascinated at the ferocious survival will of the trapped inmates. Most fight to the death for their very existence. The strongest claw their way to the top of the pile and the weakest end up underneath. The infants and the elderely lie crushed with their skulls smashed and some of their stomachs burst open, under the weight of the heavier corpses on the top. Some of the captives had just arrived in the camp and were still healthy and well fed. The largest group is stacked up against the door of the chamber like they are trying to escape from their entombment.
Some attack each other and others tear their hair out by the roots. The frenzied scrachers and scrapers rip their nails against anything around them and bash their heads off the dark blue, inky walls of the chamber of extermination, filled with wretchedness and hopelessness. The piercing screams and screeches are fused with the endless, spine tingling shrieking, wailing and weeping, which slowly subside into a deathly silence. A ghostly stillness and calmness seems to descend like a mantle of comfort over the knotted pile of broken lives, with their stolen dreams and stolen lives. The mounds of misery are splattered with excrement, vomit, urine and bits of brain and intestines from the crushed victims. The powerful stench is joined by noxious smell of the pungent, poisonous gases.
Hans squeezes his nose together with his left hand and swallows large mouthfuls of his spirit, in order to kill the smell of the condemned and the damned. Sometimes half of a litre provides a cure and does the trick, but there are occasions when the odours cling to him and perade his insides. He’s mesmerized by some of the fixated staring eyes filled with pain, terror and shock. He believes that they’re holding secrets, which will always be locked away from him.
The Sonderkommando (Jewish, Polish and Russian inmates used by the Lublin SS) arrive and hose down the bodies and then distentangle them. They drag them outside and remove gold teeth and hair, before transporting the grizzly load to the coke-fuelled furnaces in the crematorium. The lifeless bodies melt and wrinkle as they blaze and burn. Their limbs contract and move like they’re still alive. The grotesque pageant belongs to a bizarre world that’s escaped from reality.