On Saturday a few of us visited Buchenwald which is a concentration camp right outside of Weimar. After everything that I saw, and having time to think about it for a few days , it was extremely disturbing to me. We took a train to Halle then got another connecting train to Weimar and then took a bus to Buchenwald. Once we got off of the bus , it just looked foreboding , because the sky was filled with dark gray colored clouds, and it was extremely chilly outside. We walked down to the front of the camp which looked like a huge wooden fort surround by barbed wire fences. We walked through his iron gate and into the camp which no longer contained the barracks that the Jews and other people stayed in, either they were destroyed or they where tore down either way they were no longer there but you could see their foundations, and be able to tell about how big they were and how wide they were.
(The gate into Buchenwald. Inscription reads “Jedem Das Seine”—“To each, his own”)
We walked down to the disinfection building which now contains a museum about the camp , which was very interesting and informative but also extremely disturbing at the same time. With pictures and videos of dead people in carts piled high and in the ovens as well, they also had pictures of shrunken heads and skin that they would give to the SS Officers as gifts. We got to see the spoon and forks and plates and bowls that they ate with and we actually got to see there prisoner garb and some of there shoes and buttons and things that they had with them when they had arrived. They had a room near the crematorium where they would tell people they were taking their height only to end up shooting them in the back of the neck, and at the bottom of the crematorium they had a room where they would keep dead bodies or the urns of ashes, and they also had hooks on the walls that were used for strangulation.
(Basement of the Crematorium. Notice the black hooks on the walls)
So if your reading this and are disturbed just imagine what it was like seeing these things up close. After we toured the camp we headed back up to the front where the soldiers’ barracks where and watched a thirty minute long movie on the camp and some of the Jewish people who actually survived and lived to tell their tales. In the video one of the Jewish men said that the Officers figured that the people needed 1.50 a day to live, so in other words $1.50 was used to buy food and other supplies each day for every prisoner, and yet the blood hounds that were used to track down the prisoners when they tried to escape where allotted $3.50 a day for food and materials.
They showed how the Nazi's would make propaganda movies by filming the officers and their children at the zoo that held a bear, which was no more than five feet from the barbed wire fence that enclosed thousands of people. They would also get prisoners to smile and act like everything was perfect, so that they could fool everyone as to what was really going on.
At the end of the video it told that when the Americans arrived they found dead bodies piled high in carts and in the crematorium where the soldiers had left them as they flied the camp so they wouldn’t get caught. The most interesting thing though was that the American soldiers made the citizens of Weimar come and tour the camp and see all of the bodies and the people that were left, it showed women fainting and crying and as well they should have been.
Seeing things like this really give you a greater respect for life, and the hopes that nothing like this will ever happen again.
No comments:
Post a Comment