• Auschwitz-Birkenau
• Majdanek
• Bełżec
• Natzweiler-Struthof
• Będzin
• Chania

Auschwitz-Birkenau

I visisted Auschwitz-Birkenau with my girlfriend in October 2006 and since that time have produced work with the aim of expressing what it felt like to be there on that day over sixty years after the end of the war. Through my research my work has changed and moved in many different directions, but always there is the memory of that dreadful place somewhere in the background.
www.nicholashedges.co.uk/places/auschwitz-birkenau/

Majdanek

I visited the Majdanek concentration camp in May 2007 having previously been quite unaware of its existence. Certainly, its name does not carry the same sense of gravitas as, for example, Auschwitz or Treblinka, but out of all the camps it's perhaps the best preserved.
www.nicholashedges.co.uk/places/majdanek/

Bełżec

Driving through the village of Bełżec, it was hard to tell exactly where the camp was; to be honest, neither of us knew quite what to expect. And whereas before, in the camp at Majdanek we found patches of colour in amidst the piles of shoes, so here in Bełżec, as we drove down the road, we saw a shadow in amidst the countryside; a charcoal scar like a field ravaged by fire. This was it, and it took our breaths away.
www.nicholashedges.co.uk/places/belzec/

Natzweiler-Struthof

The Gallery, Oxford Town Hall. Deadman's Walk and the University of Oxford Botanic Gardens. Shown as part of M8, Oxford Brookes MA Interdisciplinary Art Graduate Show.
www.nicholashedges.co.uk/places/natzweiler-struthof/

Będzin

I first discovered Będzin in a book I bought in Auschwitz-Birkenau which contained reproductions of photographs found in the camp just after its liberation. Many of the photographs were those which had once belonged to people who'd lived in the town and who in the summer of 1943, had been taken to Auschwitz and murdered.
www.nicholashedges.co.uk/places/bedzin/

Chania

The Jewish Quarter was immediately looted - first by the soldiers. In the late afternoon they synagogue of Etz Hayyim was stripped of all its religious artefacts and left to be rented by squatters. After almost two weeks of imprisonment at Ayas, with little food and no changes of clothes, the Jews of Hania were loaded onto trucks and driven to the east of the island to Herakleion. The official count is that 265 men, women and children arrived there on the 9th June and were put on board a converted tanker called the Tanais that set sail for Athens that evening at 8.00.
www.nicholashedges.co.uk/blog/2007/08/chania.html