Buchenwald

This was one of the things I was anticipating the most. I guess that sounds strange, to say I was looking forward to touring a concentration camp. I knew that it would be emotional. And it was. But so were other places I have seen - former slaves' quarters in the U.S.; Robben Island in Cape Town where Nelson Mandela was held. But this was Buchenwald. Just the name alone creates a heaviness in one's soul. This is the place where thousands died, thousands were tortured, thousands were treated as if they were less than human. If evil had an address, it might have been Buchenwald.

The first thing that struck me was the scale. When the person at the information desk said it would take at least 3 hours to see only the most important things, I knew that it was a big place. Most people can't see everything even in one day. So we saw what was most important. But those places were the places of greatest suffering. When you enter the crematorium, a sign asks you to enter in silence out of respect for those who lost their lives. I didn't need a sign. There were not words for the sight of four furnaces, meant to reduce the dead to ashes after they had already been reduced to skeletons. The were no words for the cellar were the corpses were stored. The air is heavy with sorrow.

We saw photos and objects taken from the prisoners. We saw their faces and their shoes, worn threadbare. Maybe what struck me most was the photos taken after the Allies liberated the camp. It was the first camp that was liberated, so it was the first time the Allied soldiers had seen the true horrors of the Nazi regime. They wanted to make sure that there were witnesses so that no one could come back later and accuse them of making up unbelievable stories. (I thought of the disciples of Jesus fighting the same accusations.) So the Allies documented everything on film and had journalists write it all down. Most important, they had 1,000 people from the nearby town of Weimar tour the camp, see the dead bodies stacked like cordwood, see the emaciated men who were imprisoned there. The look of shock and disbelief on those faces is maybe what will stay with me the longest. "We didn't know," they said. How could they not have known? They didn't want to know. They probably suspected, but the questions were too difficult and dangerous too ask.

What is it that I don't want to know? What suffering is taking place in my neighborhood, city, country, world? What would shock and horrify me if I was forced to face it? The most unsettling thing about Buchenwald is that it refuses to stay back in history ...