It's a story we've all heard; pictures we've all seen. But to see the size of the place, to walk where human beings did such horrible things to one another, to read some of the personal stories . . . it broke my heart. And how sad to hear someone quoted saying about the liberation, "For a short period of time, we thought something like this would never happen again."
In August 1945, Buchenwald became the site of Soviet Special Camp #2. Over a period of 5 years, more than 7,000 additional prisoners (this time interned Germans) died within the camp grounds.
Fortunately it's now a memorial site, sparing it the usual tourist junk. In America they'd be selling t-shirts saying "I survived Buchenwald."
2 comments:
So Buchenwald became a Soviet labor camp likely with our collaboration.
Was it crowded in late July?
AND in the US we'd have little cedar models of the camp, and cedar toothpick holders saying "Buchenwald". And, yes, we'd all continue to believe we knew nothing about it until we liberated the prisoners. They didn't have bumper stickers back then that said "Save Buchenwald" or "Save Hitler's Prisoners".
And of course nothing like it has happened since then.
Okay, back to singing in the bar...
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