At the foot of a pine tree, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski bent to touch the black, moist shapes nestling amid the fungi and leaf mulch. "I've been monitoring this area now since 2015, and always hope I won't stumble upon anything any more and that one day the entire area will have been cleared," he said. This, however, was not that day.
The 39-year-old poet, scholar and rock musician was walking in the forest just metres from the perimeter fence of what was once the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp in the Germanannexed territory of Poland, and is now a memorial site in Sztutowo, a village 38km east of Gdańsk on the Baltic coast.
What he was looking for - and what, over the course of two hours in midMarch, he found - are shoes: hundreds of soles, large and broad, small and narrow, bordered with cobblers' tack holes; soft, thin fragments of leather upper parts, their decorative perforations and colours clearly visible.
Every time he came here, he said, he was struck "by the softness of the ground, by the entire surface littered with strange mounds and elevations. You feel that you're not walking on compacted earth but on hundreds of thousands of shoes."
Stutthof, which was built by the Nazi regime to persecute Polish political prisoners and later became an integral part of the machinery to exterminate European Jews, eventually assumed a role as leather repair collection point for all of Nazi Germany's concentration camps. The shoes transported there after their wearers had been sent to their deaths - were recycled into leather goods such as belts, rucksacks and holsters.
Denne historien er fra May 03, 2024-utgaven av The Guardian Weekly.
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Denne historien er fra May 03, 2024-utgaven av The Guardian Weekly.
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Starlink's conquest of the Amazon leaves Brazil in a dilemma
The helicopter swooped into one of the most inaccessible corners of the Amazon rainforest. Brazilian special forces commandos leaped from it into the caiman-inhabited waters below.
Dalai Lama's mountain town feels the strain of tourist boom
SUVs and saloon cars pass slowly along McLeod Ganj's narrow one-way Jogiwara Road, blaring horns at pedestrians and scooter riders and playing loud music.
'I am all the world' The brutal rule of a West Bank settler
Palestinians tell ofblacklisted Yakov's reign across the Jabal Salman valley and heisjust one of many violent bosses
Stormy waters New flashpoint emerges in South China Sea dispute
Hopes that tensions in the South China Sea might ease have been short lived.
'Justice delayed' Why trust in public inquiries to bring closure is fading
After the final report of the Grenfell fire inquiry was published, Hisam Choucair, who lost six family members in the blaze, said: \"We did not ask for this inquiry... It's delayed the justice my family deserves.\"
Celeriac soup with almond pangrattato
I'm not ashamed to say that as soon as September hits, my stick blender comes out. Just as I embrace salads when the clocks go forward in the UK, I wholeheartedly throw myself into soup season once the summer holidays end. Autumn is approaching in the northern hemisphere and I'm ready with my ladle. Celeriac is one of my favourite soup heroes, because it gives the creamiest, silkiest finish with little effort. You don't have to make the almond pangrattato, but it is a wonderful addition.
Are smoke signals telling me to make an oil change in the kitchen?
Should you that is, not can you) cook with extra-virgin olive oil? Antonio, Atlanta, Georgia, US
Going underground
A darkly humorous encounter between an American spy-cop and the members ofan eco-commune she is hired to infiltrate
All work and no play
Hard Graft, a powerfulnew London exhibition, focuses onworkers’ exploitation, from the ruined hands ofa washerwoman to mothers forced to sell their bodies
What the princess and the shaman tell us about hereditary privilege
It should have been an Instagram-perfect wedding image, but it turned out to be something more embarrassing.