Salaspils Concentration Camp, Latvia
Erin Faith Allen at Salaspils Concentration Camp, Latvia © 2017
I’m standing at the entrance to Salaspils concentration camp outside of Riga, in Latvia.
This camp held political prisoners such as Communists, Jews, children, and Soviet POWs. When the tide of the war turned it held German POWs.
The words translate to: Beyond these gates the ground still moans.
I was colder than I’ve ever been.
And in the piercing icy stillness the thrum of a heartbeat … thump thump, thump thump ... filled the Baltic air through an installation.
.
Human behavior in wartime fascinates me.
Some of us live in peacetime, yet every day we face a choice: connect and grow, and / or disconnect and destroy.
For me, places like this camp represent the extreme of disconnect, where the collective has chosen one little disconnect at a time, and blindly churned itself toward evil ...
... And we are left with places where the ground still moans.
Erin Faith Allen is an investigative war historian and the founder of Fortitude Research, specializing in WWII archival research, wartime reconstruction, Holocaust documentation, and the recovery of women's wartime histories. She is a leading authority on the 42nd "Rainbow" Infantry Division and the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. Her forthcoming book, One Day Over the Rhine, is in active development.
All original photographs and written work published on this site are copyright Erin Faith Allen. Historical and archival images are used where they exist in the public domain.
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