Jedem Das Seine

the only picture I took of the camp

Hey guys, so this is what I wrote in the car after our visit to Buchenwald. 

When I returned from Central Europe in 2011, my entire family without fail would always ask some variation of "so yeah, what was it like being in Auschwitz?" I had no answer. No words did justice to the horrific monstrosity that was and is Auschwitz. Not even pictures can explain the feelings, the atmosphere. However, this time I am going to try and put the experience into words. What a concentration camp is like (at least from my perspective). And I will try my darnedest to do it some justice. 

On the third day of the Tufts-in-Tübingen-in-the-former-DDR adventure, we went to Buchenwald, a work camp roughly 45 minutes northwest of Jena. Unlike Auschwitz, Buchenwald was only a work camp. There weren't/aren't large ovens that gassed people alive. However, 600,000 people still died over the course of this camp's five year (1940-1945) existence from overwork, beatings, starvation, dehydration, and extreme weather. 

Buchenwald is a quiet place. Just like Auschwitz, all you seem to hear is the sound of feet crushing gravel, leaves, and ice. It is a permeated silence. Thick with death, suffering, and memories. You're with a group, but you're alone. You feel very alone. In this case, it was cold. The kind of late November cold (then -3°C) that envelopes you. But you know it will get colder. And then you think of the inmates. Emaciated with their wooden shoes and their striped prison suits. If I'm cold in my coat and boots, imagine their suffering. The cold and the starvation and the lack of reprieve and hope. 

Your tour guide shows you a monument. It commemorates a cave in which the Nazis running the camp starved inmates as part of an experiment. See how long they can last without food, water, or adequate clothing. Meanwhile, a zoo for the SS Men's families and kids was right on the other side of the fence, with well-fed and healthy lions, tigers, and bears. 

Inside the old camp buildings (most of which have been destroyed), it doesn't seem like things have changed. The air reeks of death and ash. Six ovens stand in the middle of a large main room, still full of ash. 

Just when you think you cannot stand the cold any longer, your tour guide brings you to your relief, the museum. It's warm inside, a lovely warm. One that the inmates were deprived of every winter. You go upstairs and there you are reminded that there is no relief from the thick silence. Upstairs are pictures. Pictures of the camp, of public forest executions, of inmates. 22 years-old, 17 years-old, 35 years-old, 20 years-old. French political opponents, Hungarian Jews, Polish homosexuals. The words start to string together in your head. The faces haunt. You see them over and over. The Polish political prisoner, a bright red triangle on his breast pocket, handsome and defiant, minutes before his death standing in a forest. The recently dead and swollen faces of inmates. 

Then there's the art exhibit where you mix these drawn images with the real ones and everything becomes clearer somehow. There are shoes, and those are always the worst part. The most painful reiteration of how real these people were. And yet some how they were so easy to dehumanize. 

And American GI wrote a letter to his wife after discovering Buchenwald (post-liberation; Buchenwald was the only camp to liberate itself) and it's posted inside the museum. It seems like the best way to end this post.

I was inside a Nazi concentration camp today, and the things I saw would turn the stomach of the strongest man who ever lived. Don't let anyone tell you these things didn't happen or that the stories you hear of Nazi brutalities and atrocities are cooked up to maybe sell more bonds or get more recruits for the WAC's. I saw it and smelled it and I talked with men who had been living in hell for five years.