The Pensive Traveller - The Serious Side of Travelling
There are some places in the world that are charged with so much history that they are difficult to visit. I’ve never been to Cambodia’s Killing Fields, nor to the concentration camps of Poland and Germany, so I can’t speak from personal experience about what is to be seen and felt there. But I did visit Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, and was emotionally silence by what I saw. To stand in the very room where she hid, and to learn that she was discovered only days before the war finished, was something so incredibly visceral that it evades description.
I was talking to a friend recently about his experiences at the Killing Fields. He said he couldn’t speak for many hours after his visit. “What can you say to people, after seeing all of that?”
Many people avoid going to such places because they feel it would put some sort of ‘downer’ on a holiday that is meant to be fun, and I can well understand this. But it is so incredibly important that we educate ourselves about the horrors and mistakes of history so that such things are never allowed to happen again.