From Claudia 15 April 2015

Dear All,

I am just back from my walk. I walked 20 miles along the former railway lines here in the North East of Scotland.

I walked with another artist called Stuart McAdam. He was aware of your project. And we discussed how one can project a walk of such unspeakable tragedy to our spring flooded landscape today.

I told him of the various concentration camps I visited over the years.

My first visit was to Dachau, not far from where I grew up. I only went there as a young adult. I dont know why my parents had not taking me earlier. I have asked them and they have no answer.

Only some years ago I went to Sachsenhausen near Berlin, which was a strange experience, as it was full of soviet style monuments – Eastern Germany never accepted its responsibility of the atrocities of the Nazis.

A few years ago I was also in Auschwitz with my son, in the middle of the winter. I remember having a almost a melt down at him when he pulled his camera out of his pocket. There were young people posing under the Arbeit macht Frei gate.

And then – and this was the most harrowing – of them all I visited in the middle of a very harsh winter with 20 degrees minus the camp in Nis, in southern Serbia. It is the only ‘tourist attraction’ of Nis, it was left as it was by the Nazis in 1945, slowly decaying….
We were talking about this on the route for a long time. Whether lining up those visits as I just did for you above, whether this is concentration camp or terror tourism. whether such visits are important, or whether they are tasteless. The same we questioned with our walk.

Claudia Zeiske