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But now back to the DT Blog. An elaborate new Blog post went up on Thursday to mark 27 January, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz and now International Holocaust Remembrance Day. While last year I concentrated on Auschwitz only, this time I gave an overview of all the main concentration camps and death camps of the Holocaust. I’ve personally been to all these sites (with one exception: Płaszów). Thus I was able to provide one photo for each one of them. The featured photo above is the most iconic of the lot, showing the infamous ramp and gatehouse at Auschwitz II Birkenau. I tried to make the photo selection varied, so that for some camps you see some original structures like that gatehouse, for some others it’s interior shots, and for yet others it’s individual artefacts on display … and sometimes just a memorial monument, especially at those camps where nothing authentic remains.
On my main website I substantially updated the chapter for the BallinStadt emigration museum Hamburg (it’s basically three quarters a new chapter) and added minor updates to Neuengamme too (for the various locations within that sprawling complex); next I will have to start drafting a few still-outstanding all-new chapters (to cover Venice – see this Blog post – as well as Switzerland – see this Blog post).
Furthermore I have a new task: my submission for a contribution at a dark-tourism conference in May has been accepted, so I have to work that out in detail as well. It’s going to be quite a visual presentation with plenty of photos, on the topic of “Off the Beaten Track – Islands of Dark Tourism”. I just wanted something to get away from the same old standard examples that DT researchers mostly look at (Auschwitz, Anne Frank House, Chernobyl, 9/11 Museum, etc.) and present things more remote and varied. In fact, being islands is the only thing the selected eight places have in common. In every other sense they are very different from each other. I don’t know if there will be any publication coming out of the conference. That’s why I have to be a bit cagey about the details here. But I’ll see if I could put a version of the presentation on my Blog too – after the conference, obviously. For now I hope that the pandemic will not prevent the conference in Prague from going ahead as planned, and with in-person attendance rather than, yet again, remote via Zoom (that would be a real shame). Obviously I would also like to exploit the opportunity and present my book on the side and let people have a browse of it during the breaks between presentations … Also only possible if it’s a proper in-person event. So fingers crossed.
Speaking of my book, Atlas of Dark Destinations: it got a brief mention in the Metro magazine, which, so my PR contact at the publishers’ informed me, is a commuter paper in London with a circulation of well over a million. So hopefully a few commuters will have seen the note below and taken an interest, even though the Metro text is ever so slightly condescending. But as they say, the only bad publicity is no publicity (or something like that).
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