Concentration camp victims were stripped of their clothes before being sent to gas chambers, and it is difficult not to draw this parallel. Such a vast amount of cast off garments exacerbates the mass-murder effect. Clothes are our most private possessions –closest to our bodies — and here they are turned from the personal into the impersonal.
    Each individual square of the clothing grid is illuminated by a cold fluorescent industrial light that hangs on wires from rusty steel poles. There are speakers mounted to the poles that play the sounds of human heartbeats at various speeds. The rhythmic sound of heartbeats and the poles bring to mind the railroads by which the Nazis delivered their victims to concentration camps.
    In the middle of the grid the clothes are thrown into a twenty-five-foot-high pile. An industrial crane sits behind the mound, its red metal claw methodically lowering, grabbing a heap of garments, lifting, and discarding them back onto the pile. The scene is haunting and captivating. With No Man’s Land Boltanski succeeds in evoking a feeling of sorrow and indignation, not an easy feat considering that today the Holocaust theme is often used for cheap moralizing.