September 20, 2003: Screw That

I had a free morning today while most of the others had business meetings to attend, so I decided to drive the half-hour to Buchenwald. Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps, known for being a "work camp." As opposed to Auschwitz, which is remembered for being a death camp, or Terezin, which was the "model" camp shown to the Red Cross, Buchenwald brutally worked its prisoners building railroads and armament houses.

I knew that going there would be tough no matter what, so I purposely chose to go by myself. I wasn't sure what my reaction would be, however. I have visited Dachau and Terezin, but I freaked out twelve years ago outside the gates of Auschwitz in Poland, and didn't go inside. I haven't been quite prepared to directly confront the holocaust since.

As I drove in my rental car, a few things were swirling around my head. First off, I had yesterday's "identity" thoughts. I wanted to see what it felt like to be there as a variety of people, not just as a Jew. That sounds like politically-correct mumbo-jumbo, but I just mean I wanted to see if it was even possible to not go in with any kinds of assumptions about what my reaction would be based on what my past reactions have been. And as I drove there through lovely countryside, I was trying on my idea from yesterday, the "this is beautiful country and people I am related to lived here; maybe Germany is something I should embrace" thing.

Which segued into the second set of thoughts in my head. Someone had commented upon seeing Buchenwald that you could tell "evil happened there." And it got me wondering if the spot had been evil before or only after. Was there always something sinister about that spot? And years from now would it still seem sinister? Or would it look like a grassy Civil War battlefield. . . beautiful if you didn't know its history?

The third thought was about the others who had died there. Six million Jews were killed during World War II, but six million others died too -- gypsies, political prisoners, gays, social misfits, Marxists. This is particularly emphasized at Buchenwald since in the days of the GDR the whole camp was a monument to the communists who had died. (They were described as the "fighters against Nazism" as opposed to the mere "victims of Nazism" which summed up everyone else.) I wanted to pay a little more attention to the history of others during the holocaust.

None of these thoughts had a specific destination, and I was not so presumptuous as to be trying to "understand" -- I just wanted to go to Buchenwald without planning ahead of time what my reaction would be.

Such fuzzy, middle-ground, "gray" thoughts were not destined to survive for long. My first clue was the large poster over the museum entrance announcing the current exhibit: Schwarze und Weiß (Black and White). It was a black and white photo exhibit, but I didn't realize that until about an hour later -- I assumed the title had to do with the clear cut nature of the crimes here. My first thought was: "Well, there is obviously no room for middle ground on the morality issue."

I walked into the camp -- under the 60-year-old sign that said in German "To each his own" -- and the anger started. What twisted mind puts that on the wrought-iron gate meant specifically to cage the people who are "different"? I took a few photos of the barren landscape with some of the green Germany hills in the background, and in my head there was a mantra: "I just want to see something beautiful. I need something beautiful." Which is right about the point when I lost it. Because there sure as hell isn't a damn bit of beauty to be seen.

And you know what else? There may have been all sorts of other prisoners held at Buchenwald, but the people who were starved, the people on whom the medical experiments were done, the people rounded up every morning to work to pave the "Road of Blood", or to dig at the quarry, or to die building a railroad in 100 days -- they were the Jews. Others suffered too, but it was the Jews who were singled out for the worst outrages. The Jews were the ones worked, flogged, denied food, and cremated in mass piles when they died in droves.

I am sure there will be days again when I can look at this countryside and think of it as my own. And I love my German friends -- I do not hold the people today responsible for what happened during World War II. But forget it. Screw the gray areas.

I cried while using the rest of my film to photograph the barbed wire.