Someday, Everywhere.

In 2012 I got the chance to visit the Buchenwald concentration camp,Germany.This camp was used as a labor and not an extermination camp.Yet, 56k people died here.Situated on a hill,overlooking a beautiful valley.From the complex in front which once housed the SS,it is a short downhill walk to the main gatehouse.The clock on the main gate house is struck at 3.15 to honor the liberation time,and a very what I would consider twisted message is carved on the gate,which means“To each his own."We were told to continue inside following an audio guide around.Oddly there is not much to see inside.It is a very bleak hill side.On my way down to the gatehouse,I had a sense of not wanting to go in,of maybe just waiting for everybody outside yet I was the last person to leave the camp.I felt something oddly quiet and eerie in the air. I remember one of my friends had told me a day before,“60 years is not a long time, and when you stand there and reflect as to what happened there just 60 years ago, it would shake you.”And it did.Buchenwald concentration camp should shake you,violence and atrocities should shake you.
And as we entered the gatehouse,with each step I went in my shell,I had to prod myself to go on.The first thing that struck me was the emptiness of the place,which was a horror fest not so long ago.The sense of emptiness was overpowering.Inside,the only building left in its original condition is the crematorium.I got oddly detached as I proceeded,I guess I was dumbfounded.The other buildings that are still standing are a prisoner infirmary barrack,the canteen,the prisoner depot and the decontamination centre.The weather was hot and sweaty.I could not imagine a beautiful day at the camp;a delightfully ordinary and truly beautiful spring day. In fact in my image nothing beautiful and ordinary ever happen there.The hardest thing to reconcile,I think,was that it did.The sun did shine and the wind did blow and it did while people inside were tortured for nothing.The prisoners must have looked down the hill, into the valley, and on those beautiful days it must have seemed so much more cruelly absurd.
Ironically having been to Buchenwald makes it so much harder to believe what had actually happened,I could not actually process everything I saw.But it becomes almost unthinkable that this place was barely few miles away from the city centre, a few miles from Goethe’s house,and to try to imagine how people could build a place like this one,let alone live in its shadow.