Why ash rain?
The autumn 1998, we went with our class school on a trip to Polen and Germany. The main subject on this trip was to visit the consentration and death camps "Auschwitz I" and "Auschwitz II - Birkenau" in Polen and "Sachsenhausen" and "Ravensbrück" in Germany. This excperience really meant something to us, and it has concerned us a lot. When we in 1999 had to find a subject for this contest, the choice was quite clear: We had to write about what happened at these places, and about the feelings we had when visiting them.
Why the name ash rain?
When the prisoners first came to one of the death camps, they were told that the only way out of there was up through the chimney at the crematorium. Up to thousands of people were every day killed in a death camp. The bodies were cremated, and the smoke and ashes from this fell down as "rain" in and around the camp. One can imagine how hard it must have been for the prisioners who still were alive, to watch this rain of ashes and know that they might not live for much longer.
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