What do you feel when you go through the opened fence of Auschwitz? Have you ever thought about going through the opened fence?

We wanted to have a project with a strong message and quickly came up with the idea of exploring the feelings we had while going through Auschwitz. So, we decided to draw the opened fence of Auschwitz on a transparency and write a poem on the other side of the transparency. If you look from one side of the transparency you see the poem the wrong way round in between the poles of the fence and it seems to be part of the barbed wire as if it was never opened. But from the other side you can read the poem and you see that the fence is opened. In the poem we described the feelings we had while approaching the fence that once was closed.

We tried to imitate the barbed wire to catch the attention of viewers and to create feelings. The chestnuts symbolize the whole story of the end of World War II: the bur of a chestnut with its barbs stands for the Holocaust and the war’s destruction of European Jewry which hurts so deeply. The chestnut inside stands for a new beginning out of the ashes and symbolizes renewal.