The transit camp for Jews at Riebnig

Today is the third consecutive day I've travelled from Wrocław to Rybna, a small village known as Riebnig when my great-grandparents were interned in a transit camp there between November 1941 and March 1943, prior to their deportation to Auschwitz.

The most convenient way to reach Rybna would be by car, but when reading Alfred Konieczny's research on the transit camp, I noted that deportees were transported by rail to the nearby town of Poppelau (now Popielów), before walking the roughly six kilometres to Riebnig. The railway line is still in use, although only two trains stop at Popielów on weekdays and none at the weekend. The train from Wrocław Główny to Popielów is scheduled at 4:20am, so please forgive me if this post is pure nonsense, as this is the third day I've been up since 3am.

The train running along this route is a rattly old Polregio EMU with seats that might as well be wooden planks, so you can feel every defect in the rails vibrate through your core, almost as though you were travelling on a Northern Rail Pacer to Accrington. The guard working Wednesday morning seemed surprised and sympathetic that I was travelling from Wrocław to Popielów, explaining that if I missed my train home that afternoon I might never be seen again (more Accrington vibes).

Once he'd shuffled off, I settled in to listen to the train clattering over rail joints and to wait for any sign of the sun rising. I didn't see another soul on the train before it eventually slowed for Popielów station, still in the pitch dark, and with the hour-and-a-half journey having given me time to reflect on how my grandparents must have felt travelling this exact route 84 years ago. I can't relate. I've lived a charmed life and have never needed to survive or die.

There's not much going on in Popielów at 6am. The closest I came to seeing signs of life were the odd mechanical window shutter juddering open with a jolt, and a stray mongrel following me along the road to Rybna. I say stray, but I think these dogs wandering in rural areas are people's dogs that are allowed to roam, as was common in England a few decades ago.

When I got to the outskirts of Popielów I noticed something unusual: a mid-nineteenth-century villa in front of a ruined factory that had a bent chimney stack looming precipitously over it. If chimney stacks have a phallic quality to them, this one is impotent.

Continuing on to Rybna along a single-lane country road, I passed beneath a pylon crackling in the morning thaw, the high-voltage current ionising the air as frost on its conductors began to melt. My headtorch illuminated wildlife in the fields and woodland along the way, including deer, foxes, and a polecat (that could have been an oversized stoat).

I stopped to take a picture of a roadside shrine outside a cowshed, then came across another unfinished shrine that was completed by the time I came back through on the way home. Polish work ethic.

After a while I noticed a church spire on the horizon, which I knew represented the location of the building in which my grandparents were interned. "Interned" doesn't feel like a stark enough term, but "imprisoned" wouldn't be completely accurate as they were able to leave the building, at least to work and collect firewood.

So now I had a landmark to aim for, I decided to take a circuitous route. Despite the long build-up to this moment, and perhaps because of it, I didn't feel ready to face the building and its place in my family's story. Rather than approaching it directly, I walked between wheatfields and around the perimeter of the still-sleeping village, eventually coming across a rusted gate and 1940s-era guardhouse standing in a state of semi-ruin.

I stood for a while, looking at the camp and trying to imagine it as it was in 1941: a prison of sorts, certainly a site of misery and coercion and fear. A component in the machinery of industrial-scale persecution. I don't know whether I lack imagination, and I don't believe I lack empathy, but it didn't menace me in the way I thought it might. Despite the guardhouse and fence, it doesn't have many of the attributes that such places are supposed to possess, that I'm used to seeing in this context. It's now used as some kind of agricultural store, and there were ducks and geese washing their plumage in its shadow. I found myself looking at the sort of bucolic scene that could have been painted by an artist with the sensibilities of John Constable and George Shaw combined. A beautiful thing to anyone attuned to that way of seeing.

This isn't to say that I was enjoying being there. In fact, I felt a deep sense of disquiet, disorientation, even, possibly due to the contradictions inherent in the scene. Nor did I feel welcome in the village. It was almost 8am now and I could see curtains twitching, people observing me suspiciously, their dogs discouraging me in the way that any effective guard dog would. The few interactions I had with people were difficult, and not only because of my faltering Polish. This is understandable in a rural context, and frankly, I get strange looks in Wrocław – one of the more cosmopolitan cities in Poland – but it nonetheless made me feel uncomfortable. I visited Rybna for three reasons: to trace the outlines of my family's history there, to attempt to memorialise the people interned, and to make photographs. I hadn't made a single photograph since I saw the church spire, and felt no desire to.

I decided to walk to the river, where my grandparents would have worked in the woods and along the riverbank, to see if I could find a secluded spot to eat lunch and absorb the dissonance of the place. 9am is lunchtime when you set your alarm for 3am. I didn't get as far as the river, as I spotted two strange-looking trees in the distance and wanted to see if they might make a picture. It turned out they were part of another shrine, this one inside the village cemetery, where I sat on a bench placed at the end of someone's grave.

I don't remember how the boiled egg or the sandwich tasted, but I do remember feeling quite deflated, as though all the purpose that had motivated me to come to this place had dissolved into a kind of dull, directionless fatigue. This was the moment I settled on Weltschmerz as the working title for my project, and also when I began to suspect that the outline I have for turning my pictures into a body of work might not do justice to the places I'm visiting or the people whose stories I'm trying to tell.

I'll write the second half of this tomorrow after I've caught up on some sleep and am in a better mood.