Have you ever seen two tonnes of human hair?

The Nazis used to bale this up from their captives to make cheap rugs. I saw a towering mountain like this at Auschwitz last week:

Now imagine, for a moment, that you were unlucky enough to have come here seventy years ago. Your family have been carted thousands of miles in shit-stained carriages and marched at gunpoint beneath the Arbeit Macht Frei sign.

“Work Makes You Free” – you read, as you shuffle in the cold. Perhaps you are fool enough to believe it; most arriving here have no idea what awaits them, and the Nazis work assiduously to keep it that way. Ignorance, they soon learned, makes mass murder much more efficient.

A man divides your line with a wag of his finger. Those on one side: young, able-bodied men. Everyone else – 75% – are sent for immediate ‘processing’. Your baby sister, mother and father are torn mewling from you at the entrance. You don’t know their fate, as you’re led away, and neither do they.

As it happens, your mother is taken aside, for brief experimentation. She’s later killed by injection to the heart.

Your father and sister are asked to unload their possessions, labelling them so they can ‘collect them later’.

After stripping and huddling into a group shower, they catch their final glimmer of daylight from the holes in the ceiling where the gas canisters are dropped in. Trucks rev their engines to drown out the screams.

But you were lucky, able bodied male #72138. Welcome to your new home:

You exist now only as a slave, a valueless sack of meat employed solely to aid your captors to expand their machinery of war, imprisonment and extermination. Most likely you’ll be, literally, worked to death, but not before you’ve helped carry tonnes of ash from the incinerated remains of your fellow captives. Maybe even your own family.

Starving, unable to wash, and herded like an animal your body grows sick and frail. Rumours of the true purpose of the camp spread. Typhus and starvation diarrhoea are rife. One day you try to use the group toilet and throw up over your feet:

Being young, and hot headed – the kind of guy who 70 years later might make an ill-advised joke out of genocide – you make an ill-advised attempt at rebellion. As an example to others you’re stripped naked, bound with barbed wire, led to a wall and shot.

Arbeit Macht Frei, indeed.

The problem with words is, given enough time and repetition, they lose their sting. “Gas chambers”. “Holocaust”. “Arbeit Mach Frei”. To many, these mean nothing, and perhaps in some way that’s for the best. We’re lucky that none of us are ever likely to truly appreciate such horrors ourselves.

But if you really want to make a pseudo-intellectual joke out of industrialised genocide, you might want to appreciate the history you’re mocking. Visit Auschwitz, or at least read a damn webpage. Don’t be surprised otherwise if your ignorance makes you look like something of an ass.

All photos bar the first are my own.