Buchenwald and an encounter in Weimar
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Buchenwald: Saturday July 11th. A whole group of us took the slow train [on the Saxon pass, which is 27 euros for up to five people round trip] to Weimar and most of us took the bus right to Buchenwald. The camp is only 8 kilometers from Weimar, but it's separated from the town by woods, which was intentionally designed to keep the local people from knowing much about what was going on in the camp. It's a powerful experience there, not that there's much left but what is is striking - the foundations of the many barracks, the crematoria, the disinfection building now used as a museum, and many memorials, including to the homosexuals who were interned and killed there and to the people of the many [some 34] nations who were in Buchenwald. Underneath the crematoria themselves, built in 1940 to deal with the ever rising death tolls, was a basement used as a morgue [with a conveniently designed chute for the disposal of bodies which then went by elevator up to the crematoria] and also a place with more than 1100 peope were strangled hanging on iron hooks on the wall. The museum is very good, mostly in German: designed not for us tourists but for the German people.
I had a touching experience afterwards. On the bus back to Weimar, I was alone as the rest of the group had left earlier, I noticed an old German talking to some clearly local people, and then I ran into him later in the center. He approached me, spoke to me first in German and then quickly switched to quite competant English. He said to me: "you have been to that horrible place" and words along the lines that "we must never forget." Then, when I asked him, he told me he was born in 1927 in Kassel, he was in the Hitler Jugend, as a school boy given a rifle to shoot at the American planes that flew over during the days - the Brits, it seems, flew over at night. We chatted some more and then he took my hand to say goodbye and asked me if I were Jewish; when I said yes, he kissed my hand. It was a sweet moment for me, and I think, for him.
Louise Forsyth /
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