The original experience is completely unforgettable. It is so simple, small even, cut into the hillside. One has heard so much about it, and seen pictures, but it is so ordinary. It is as ordinary as a walk in a field, and being killed on a sunshiney day. The earth slides open. Traffic is not far away, people walking down a ramp in the sunshine, silence seeping into their talk. You descend into this expanding hell. The walls appear almost translucent, so the names seem to be suspended in blackness. Pathetic human trinkets propped up against this flat slicing growing thing of darkness.
You just shudder in the open air. The closest thing to it in my experience (thank goodness) is some passages in Homer about the bitter loss of the sunbright world to those who have loved life so much.
I lost American schoolfriends in the war, so I have a personal connection to some names on the wall, but even so, nothing really prepared me ....
yours, Peter T.