Auschwitz

Auschwitz

Also in September 2006, I visited Krakow, Poland, for a conference, and took a day out to visit Auschwitz. This is something one simply has to do, once in one’s life. My father’s mother’s family, the Bergmans, and her mother’s family, the Dembitzers, all Polish, would all have been despatched at Belson or Dachau, long before Auschwitz was built to despatch the rest of European Jewry. But Auschwitz is certainly the largest, and most awesome of the camps, and a death camp where on one day at the peak of its operations 100,000 people perished.

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Scotland 2005

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In the summer of 2005 I made a visit to the Inner Hebrides, Scotland.  I have been to Scotland many times, and this proved to be the first of many more visits – almost annual from now on.  My parents first took me when I was a child, and we went to Skye, and perhaps also to the Uists, though I don’t recall exactly. My next visit, under my own steam – in a Mazda 323 – was in 1995, when Luke and I visited Edinburgh, Drumnadrochit on  Loch Ness, paid a toll to drive over the new bridge to Skye, and went to Mull and my first visit to Lochbiue, and to Iona.  In 2001 I went with Jan for my first trip to Lewis, where we spent a week in a little cottage on the main road up from the ferry port on Harris, and spent almost every day at Callanais Stone Circle.

On this trip, in 2005, I went to Skye, and returned to Mull, to again visit Lochbuie and Iona.