July 4, 1995 - age 19
I'm sitting here at Buchenwald waiting for our tour to begin. I'm facing the next few hours with a mix of dread, morbid curiosity and a longing to finally understand.
Well, we went through it. [We did not have a] long enough [time] to see the museum, reflect and walk around. It still doesn't seem real. I can't imagine how this happened. It's not that I don't believe it all occurred - it's that I can't imagine how human beings could do this. I thought that being here would make me believe it more, but even after seeing the crematorium and the recreation of the building in which they shot thousands of Russians in the neck, I still couldn't imagine it actually happening. I wish I'd had more time in the museum. One thing that was most effective in the museum was the part that had the collages of pictures of the inmates. On the nearby windows were the cutouts from the human-like forms the pictures were attached to. I liked it, despite the fact that it was pretty modern artsy. I looked at so many of those faces with their haunting expressions. It's amazing to see all the trees around the camp. They're all so straight and eerie. To me they seem to scream out and offer no solace. You couldn't run; you couldn't hide, and the only way out pretty much was death. It was like looking at the little back door of each oven. Once your corpse was in there, you were gone. There was no way out.
June 12, 1997 - age 21
Second time at Buchenwald. I'll write more later, but now: I've never been anywhere else that feels like here. It feels as if you could be in heaven, with the view to the other hills. The sky is light blue with puffy clouds, and the light blue hazes into the darker blue of the furthest away hills. The green of the opposite fields are pastel and equally hazy. You can see for miles. A whole panorama, interrupted by the red-roofed former magazine - 4 stories, ugly in comparison to this beautiful landscape. You feel like you could be floating on a cloud. The pebbles beneath my feet and yards ahead of me bring me into a strange, in-between dimension.
Back on the bus. There were some differences between this visit and the last. First of all, it's hot today, rather than colder than expected. Second, the mood is much different. It was a lot more somber with the Münster people. Herr Klabes had us keep an hour or so of silence in the bus after. Maybe people are in lighter moods, since we have to quickly go off to a Weimar city tour. Maybe I'm just looking at things differently because I've been here already and I've been to Auschwitz. Also, this is the first time I've been without [fellow student] to a concentration camp. With [fellow student] there is definitely a different mood. There are no Jews, [exactly], with us now. [Another student] is part-Jewish, but was raised very Christian. She was the one who most did not want to come here.
I remember finding the trees particularly macabre the first time I came here--they "screamed" out to me. Now I don't feel that way. I rather numb to any such feeling. Maybe because it is hard to understand and/or connect the emotions with the facts when you're confronted with the physical remains that are on such (now) beautiful land. The anger, the sorrow - they all hit me at times when I am physically distanced from these Orte des Schreckens (places of horror).
But as Ruth Klüger said, Auschwitz now is not her Lager (camp). It is that of Geister (ghosts), of those who upkeep it, etc. There's such a big difference because the people are not there - the prisoners.
It was almost the exact same kind of day when I first came here, as far as the sky. I remember my new horror at my before-that-beloved Weimar when taking the bus trip back down the mountain. Then we went to Berlin. After Buchenwald, I felt so much more uncomfortable with Germany. Now I don't. Being here for three and a half months has made me see its humanity - its innocence, as well as its guilt. I've realized some of what people have to deal with to go on with life.
March 15, 1998 - age 22
This is the first time I've cried at a concentration camp. It is my third visit to Buchenwald. When we got onto the Appellplatz (place of the roll call), I just saw the outlined ruins of the barracks and the beautiful green scenery on the other side, and then I looked back toward the gate, and I saw these people strolling in, taking pictures, [a fellow student] taking pictures. I looked back at where the barracks were, and I remembered how I had casually written a poem about my first Buchenwald visit. The way people, myself included, could be hardened or not take seriously enough the Holocaust is what made me break down and start crying. The inhumane humanity of us all. I couldn't go into the camp hardened and numb, as usual. I had been so desensitized throughout writing my thesis (about the Holocaust). It feels so cathartic to cry at the camp, finally. It's not so much about imagining what happened, but about dealing with the present - that the past is so hard to remember in the present.