Today I took a long stroll, well, longish. It was an absolutely beautiful day and the sun shone brightly and hot as I walked through the trees.

It was the Fifth day of September, Two Thousand and Eighteen and the forest was quiet and peaceful. Suddenly, I stopped. There, on the lake, just through the trees, a lone Heron, standing absolutely still on the opposite bank just yards away. I raised my camera, focused and... beautiful! A picture of pure tranquillity.

I walked on for the next twenty-five minutes or so, stopping occasionally to photograph the wonderful scenes as the gravel path wound its way through the sun-drenched woodland, the rays illuminating the ground as they broke through the green canopy above and accentuated the tiny creatures and miniscule particles that filled the arid air.

A bird tweets high in the leafy canopy, another flutters. All around me, the sounds of a tranquil, undisturbed woodland. An acorn falls to my right, a sycamore seed spins to the ground to my left, both to be lost amongst the detritus of the forest floor and perhaps left alone to spring forth as new life in the spring.

It seems idyllic, doesn't it? Like a peaceful dream, dreamt on a warm summer's night.

Well, in many ways it was. Perfect almost, if it wasn't for the reason for my presence.

Ahead, the forest gave way to a large clearing and a wide gravelled drive, perfectly straight for perhaps a hundred yards which stopped abruptly in front of a wide stone wall. A wall which was made up of twenty-six panels behind which is a wooden cross crudely fashioned from a stripped tree trunk.

It is here that my mind struggles to understand the mentality of the human race, for on those twenty-six panels are inscribed the names of three hundred and twenty-nine Jewish men who, some seventy-four years before, were executed in cold blood on this very spot by members of the Dutch SS!

They had been taken from the nearby Konzentrationslager Herzogenbusch, or Kamp Vught, The only concentration camp in the Netherlands which was run directly by the SS.

On a day such as this, I cannot for the life of me understand how such atrocities could be carried out by one group of so-called civilised human beings against another and yet, somewhere in the world, these things still happen. When I consider that, a little piece of me screams out and dies inside.

The holocaust should never be forgotten and even more, never, ever be denied!