Assordante Silenzio

This piece represents my personal journey within the Nazi concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Tangible elements gradually transform into distortions that convey what the place communicates to those who manage to hear its voice—until they can perceive it screaming.

Being in Auschwitz-Birkenau is like finding oneself inside an air bubble, in a place where everything is suspended and compressed, in an environment that feels surreal. Yet from the very first step, the stillness of the space is interrupted by a subtle distortion: a “deafening silence”.

The surrounding elements seem as though they wish to manifest, to scream, to express themselves—but they cannot. Perhaps no one has ever been able to do so here. They do not fully convince in their portrayal of this perfect picture of peace and nature.

A fatal and definitive reticence seems to reign over everything. A resonance of what once was permeates the air without limits, for eternity.

As I walk, my thoughts and certainties begin to distort. Sounds, colors, and voices are pierced by an inaudible frequency that annihilates and contorts my every reasoning.

Even the mere air of Oświęcim unravels Auschwitz from afar, crumbling my every reflection.

That exterminated humanity is still present—it speaks to me as I walk and live my daily life, evoking the urgency of an embrace, of a caress. Yet those hidden sufferings can never be expressed: here, there is no redemption—only an unpayable debt.

Auschwitz, despite the Nazis who designed it to destroy and annihilate, remains today a pulsating body that breathes and vibrates—a discreet and silent space that, in every corner, conceals the memory of an unheard-of violence that envelops and invades you, never to leave you again.

The journey ends by passing through a bright doorway—a door of awareness and knowledge through Memory. A door to be reached every day.

Giacomo Zennaro