Two influential men said to me when I was a teenager, that Auschwitz-Birkenau is a place you must have visited once in your lifetime. Neither of them said why.

Two years ago, in late 2010, I finally went to see the remainders of the largest nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. The six hour tour on that cloudy day in November shook me deeply. It was both haunting, depressing and very graphic. We were taking to the prisons, execution sites, and even walked into a gas chamber and the crematory. It was only then that for the first time I felt historically and personally attached to what was the industrialization of death and genocide less than 70 years ago.

I came back to Germany and already had the two pictures in mind that I wanted to post on this website. However, as I prepared the article, I just hat to stop because it made me deeply depressed. Now, two years later, I took the curate to go through the pictures, edit and arrange them for this gallery fighting with tears. But why?

Why should every person have seen this place, though you learn about the Holocaust in school, museums, movies and so forth? Because you need to see it for yourself to fully believe and understand it. You need to grasp the magnitude of the cruelty, atrocities and the senseless systematic killing of innocent people. Most of all, you need to see it to remember it, to tell your children and your grand children that Auschwitz is an important part of world history that must never be forgotten or denied.

Showing you this pictures and sharing this thought is the very least tribute I can pay to the victims of this madness made by human beings.

Click here or on any of the pictures below to access the gallery and the slideshow. There are no captions because I chose the let the pictures speak for themselves.

in memoriam

Click here or on the image below to see 16 impressions from a recent summer road trip to Croatia. Comments are welcome as always and if you haven’t yet, become a fan of LvxPhotography on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/LvxPhotography

I was sitting at the edge of one of the many cliffs at the Grand Canyon. A mild breeze blew onto my face, cooling my skin from the heat of that saturday in May. We had feared to be surrounded by hoards of other tourists but I we were lucky, as we were all alone heard nothing but the mountain wind.

It all felt so unreal and detached from life as I experienced it day by day. So here we stand as twenty-something year olds with a good fourth of our lives behind us, looking at a spectacular miracle that took over five million years of rivers, rain and ice to create. I had never felt this humbled by nature before.

Click on any of the images below or here to see my gallery of 25 impressions from the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona.

Delicious food! Whoever you are, wherever you are, there is always a distinct joy of savoring a tasty meal or snack. Germans like to say “Das Auge isst mit!”, which means that seeing your dish is part of the experience and hence part of the joy depending on how tasty and/or exquisite you think it looks.

In the near future I will publish a small gallery of pictures with local specialities from around the world, so regard this picture as an appetizer to the eye.

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