Last Friday I visited the Buchenwald Memorial with Sam and Amber, two other girls from the group. It was very sobering thing, and I'll admit that it did shake me up quite a bit. I don't think it's possible to go to a concentration camp and not be affected somehow.
I didn't take any pictures because I was so unsettled by how I felt, but also because I didn't like the way that tourists were running around photographing things. The crematorium had a sign to remind visitors that this was a place where thousands of people had died and it was a quiet area! I was very unimpressed with some of the conduct of the other visitors.
The camp was really a huge operation in its' heyday, but also very disturbingly close to Weimar--one of the centers of German culture. It's located 10 kilometers away, and having seen the scope of the camp I cannot imagine how people did not know what was going on. That thought was very, very freaky in and of itself, but the camp itself exudes an air of foreboding. It was like a weight of despair settled on my shoulders the minute I walked through the gate, and it lingered for the rest of the day. There's just a feeling of a loss of hope, both in humanity and in society, that something as terrible as the Holocaust was allowed to happen.
What's worse is when you realize that genocide is still a very real, very present thing in today's society--didn't we learn anything from the Holocaust? I honestly don't know, but I don't think this post does a very good job of describing how I felt or the experience because there just are no words to describe it accurately.
Overall, it was a meaningful spring break because of this day trip, and one I am likely to never forget.
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