Thoughts from Places: Buchenwald

Raspberry chocolate chip pancakes with powdered sugar
on top.

The orchid in my window bloomed!
Happy winter, y'all!

Main entrance to the camp. There's still a fence there on the
right.

As you can see, I've been keeping busy baking, taking pictures of my food, and ignoring the plants in my apartment. (There were 6 flowers in full bloom before I noticed the orchid. Also I water it maybe twice a month. I'm surprised it's alive.)

But sometimes I catch a cold then decide it's a smashing idea to spend my Saturday at a former Nazi concentration camp that also did a few years as a Soviet concentration camp. So on Saturday I got on a train & headed to Buchenwald.

Buchenwald's actually not that far from my apartment. When you visit ega, you can see all the way out there from the observation tower on a clear day. It's just a 15-minute train ride to Weimar, then a 20-minute bus ride to the KZ. (pronounced caw-zett. The German for concentration camp is Konzentrationslager, but they shorten it to KZ sometimes.)

Former building foundation?

Unfortunately, I had to wait 30 minutes for the bus after getting to Weimar, so I walked around a bit and marveled once again at how incredibly hipster Weimar is. (There's a movie theater in an old train station. Seriously.)

After I got to Buchenwald, I looked at the map before starting to walk around without rhyme or reason. There was a giant stone that served as a memorial to all the people who were detained there, as well as an exhibit of interviews with survivors. The gates here don't say "Arbeit macht frei;" they say "jedem das seine," which means "to each his own."

Gates? Chimneys?

All of the barracks had been torn down - the only one that was there was a reconstruction, so you could see all the way across the former barrack area to the forest behind the main part of the camp. (The area was pretty even in winter, and will probably be gorgeous in spring.) After walking through the barracks area, I went to the forest area, which was apparently known as the little camp. It was where sick people/people who they really wanted dead were stuck. All those buildings were torn down as well, but there were signs everywhere saying where buildings used to be.

Forest slightly beyond the historical
markers.

After a bit the signs stopped, but the path kept on for a while, so I followed it. The forest was beautiful, so that's where most of these pictures came from. It reminded me of the state park back home. It sounds morbid: this place where tons of people died reminds me of a park back home. But it's not, really, if you think about it. People weren't dying there right then, and since the sky stubbornly refuses to snow (30 degrees and huge grey clouds today, but no snow), the overall atmosphere was very Oklahoma in January.

 After I wandered through the woods for a bit, I headed over to a memorial to the people killed in the camp. The explanation was in English, and the memorial was paid for mostly by Americans. That sort of thing gives me really mixed feelings. I understand that some people were trying to honor their family members, but it kind of looks like a "look at the US, we're so great, we rescued you from the Nazis and now we're giving you money" sort of thing. After the memorial, I went into the museum. I didn't really look around that much - there was a lot of stuff about the origins of the KZs, which I already knew, and the Buchenwald-specific stuff was kinda interesting, but the building was super warm and I was sick, so I felt like I was being suffocated when I got the tiniest bit warm. There was a part at the end about how great America was for liberating the camp. (see above for my opinions on that)

It's so damp here; moss grows on everything outdoors.

Once I went through the museum, I went over to the second museum that was about Buchenwald as a Soviet camp. It was only a Soviet camp for a few years until the Germans found out what was up and got really upset. The best part of that was a bunch of Soviet propaganda posters they had in both German and Russian. (Stuff like: Erfurt welcomes the victorious Red Army!)

After that I tried to walk through the crematorium. (I couldn't do it. Too heavy for me.) Then I walked back to the bus stop and headed back into town. The bus back into Weimar seemed to take much longer than the ride to Buchenwald.

I walked around Weimar's mall for a bit before getting a McFlurry and fries at the train station. I was back in Erfurt before 5 that evening.

American-funded memorial. (Some of it was paid for by the
governments of Germany and Thueringen as well.)

Poster from the Soviet museum. "New teachers for
the new schools!" (De-nazification meant that
everyone who did anything vaguely important
while the Nazis were in power lost their jobs,
apparently including the teachers.)

From the movie Fack ju, Goethe.
The students don't know where
their teacher is taking them.
"Please not another trip
to a concentration camp!"
(Source)

My day trip to Buchenwald made me think, which is what places like Buchenwald are meant to do. This picture is of the cleared barrack area. It's so pretty. It's not entirely clear here, but the hills in the background have windmills on them. It's really pretty. The trees actually whisper there. It's a thing I've always read about in books, but there I could actually hear the trees whispering. It makes me angry that such a beautiful place has such a horrific past, so I feel a bit bad about thinking that it's a beautiful place. Then I have to think about why Buchenwald is still there. Most of the visitors in the guest book I saw were foreign - and out of those, most of the people were American. Why do these camps still exist? Are they memorials or constant reminders to the German people? (Lots of German kids go to concentration camps as a field trip in high school.) Ever worse, are they just there to attract tourists? (The camps and museums are free to visit, but there are gift shops and donation buckets.) Sometimes it feels like Germany is one giant apology for Nazism, and at this point, the vast majority of Germans had nothing to do with it, and they're very anti-Nazi. (Obviously, there are still neo-Nazis in this country, but they're met with much more opposition than such groups are in the US.) Maybe they should be allowed to decay. Maybe someday no one will come to visit, and that'll be okay. People shouldn't be forced to pay for the sins of their forefathers forever, no matter what those sins are. I don't see Americans being forced to feel guilty for slavery - I know that I don't feel personally responsible, although I deplore the idea of human slavery. Maybe instead of looking back, Germany should look forward and try to remedy some of its problems, like racism and income inequality, which aren't being fixed by wallowing in the past.