(Deutsche Welle) “I need a shower for my soul and my body right now,” says Khaled Naeem. He has just come out of the dim building that houses the incinerators at Auschwitz and into the heat and blinding sun.
He is deeply moved and close to tears, exhausted by the experience: the ovens, the mountains of shoes and human hair, the cramped barracks and the knowledge that more than 1 million people were systematically murdered here. “Like a factory,” says Khaled, “it just makes me sad.” He saw much suffering himself as he fled from Syria and traveled through Jordan before arriving in Germany: dead bodies on the side of the road, entire families drowned in the Mediterranean.
Masa Alimam, a 17-year-old Syrian girl, is overpowered as well: “The worst for me was to learn what the Nazis did to the children. They were just murdered, too.”
