Day 68 - An Horrific Past

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Just a short (and solemn) blog post today as we actually did something quite unusual for most of our rest day - we rested.
We did visit two historical sites from WWII that are related in the most horrific manner. You see the Nazi's turned the Kings Army Barracks and surrounding buildings here in Nis into a concentration camp. It was mainly used for short term detention of prisoners before being relocated somewhere else as forced labour, unless of course they were executed instead.
While some executions were carried out in the camp, most were taken to Bubanj a few kilometers away where they were executed and placed in mass graves.
The concentration camp is mainly untouched from the end of WWII and is now a museum in honour of those that were imprisoned and murdered there. At Bubanj a memorial in the form of three non-uniform giant concrete fists have been erected representing the Men, Women and Children executed at the site. It is estimated that 10,000 people were killed while the camp was in operation. There was a single escape from the camp of 142 people which reskted in the Nazis retaliating by killing 300 prisoners.
It was a very sombre and disturbing experience walking through the museum knowing you were in the actual rooms the prisoners were kept, while reading their fist hand accounts.
I think museums like this play an important role in making sure we remember the atrocities that occurred and those they occurred to in the hope we don't repeat the same mistakes again.
Tomorrow we get into some ral hills with about 1000m of climbing. It's just under 70kms to our next stop Pirot.
Distance travelled today: 10kms
Distance travelled so far: 3,670kms

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Photos

Bubanj Memorial Park
Scene of some 10,000 executions by the Nazis in WWII