Memoirs of a Fool

These photographs were taken last year in 'Eperlecque', a destroyed bunker planned as a V2 rocket launch site. This is not the bunker mentioned in this post; all photographs taken there were unuseable as every picture ended up being cloaked in a strange, white mist, presumably from the cold/damp conditions.

A few years ago, I went to a World War Two bunker in France. Obviously it was built by the Germans during the occupation of France. If you've never visited a bunker before, imagine a huge slab of concrete with wire breaking out of cracks like veins and flesh. Even the bunkers themselves look like death, grey and intimidating. Imagine walls up to 30 metres thick made of solid concrete, with underground chambers and areas built just to launch rockets, and thousands of captured prisoners working to build it. It's the ultimate irony that the workers who tired and sweated and perished to raise the huge structures from the ground were the very people who the masterminds behind the bunkers sought to exterminate. Anyway, this particular bunker was never finished, because just as it neared completion it was bombed by the Allied forces, killing tens of thousands of slave workers and burying them half-alive under tonnes of rubble and concrete. The bunker must not have been abandoned as this area was built over, and we were able to walk over it. We walked over the accidental graves of thousands of people, and we didn't even know their names. We walked over the accidental graves of thousands of people and they were forgotten by everyone except us. There was no plaque outside to commemorate their loss as anything unusual, presumably because the loss of a few thousand out of 11 million is really just a tiny drop of mercury in an ocean full of the stuff, but to think that we were THERE, only a few metres away from a sea of decay and memories and trapped souls was sickening. I've never seen a dead body before, unless you count roadkill or the scene of a fatal car accident or the mummies at the British Museum. I've never been so close to a scene of complete atrocity. But really, what upset me about it is the fact that all those people were just that; people. They loved and hated and thought and laughed and breathed and WERE and now they're not and no-one knows anything about them. That's no way to leave this world. There should always be someone to remember you, something in which your essence lives on, be it a journal or a son or a photograph. These people had nothing. If any of their relatives are still alive, do they know how they died? Do they think that they died in a concentration camp, or in war, or of disease? No-one should ever have to die without being remembered. At least we now remember the victims of the Holocaust, but we don't remember them as individuals. We remember them as a mass of unfortunate and doomed people, writhing in hatred together, but only as 'Holocaust victims', when before they were Holocaust victims they were sons and daughters and brothers and sisters. The only point I am trying to make here is that no-one should have to be alone and forgotten. If I were Prime Minister, I'd make it a law that everyone went to a graveyard every week and read all the names on the gravestones and thought about that person, whether they knew them or not, and maybe mourn the loss of that person's character and experiences. But we're humans. We don't do that. That would be unselfish.