Brown coal opencast mining: In the background you can see the huge digger that works 24/7. Little towns and villages that are placed on top of brown coal findings are removed. The inhabitants must leave their home towns and villages for the common good. To protect their houses from vandalism they nail or brick up the doors and windows with wooden planks or stones:
When you drive through one of these villages you feel like you are in a ghost village. Nobody around, no cars, no sign of human living. Here and there you might meet somebody who visits the place like me as a 'tourist'. What you often see though are containers for rubbish on the streets (in the picture below in the background):
The closer the date of destruction comes the more and more people have already left their homes. Although there is no way around inhabitants try to stay and protest. Or they address people like me who visit the place as a sight:
'People still live here. There's nothing for free.'
'Looters: Please wait for our dispossession to be through. Then we are used to giving away things for free.'
Another sign saying that the inhabitants don't give up and try to stay:
Although the financial compensation is good the moving means an essential loss of home and emotional security. Imagine you never will be able to go back to the place you were born.
Houses and farms are destructed but what about churches? What about graveyards?
Sometimes churches are relocated. The following picture is from East Germany, the other large brown coal opencast mining in Germany:
