Buchenwald

I don't have any experience that I can compare with visiting a concentration camp. It's not like a battlefield (where there were winners) or a memorial (which is abstract), a funeral (which is personal), or a cemetery (which is peaceful).

Outside the town of Weimar is Buchenwald concentration camp. Just this weekend was the 70th anniversary of Buchenwald's liberation by U.S. soldiers in 1945. Three American veterans who were part of the effort showed up, all in their 90s, along with 80 former prisoners.

This was my second visit to a concentration camp. The other one I saw is Bergen-Belsen, located closer to Hannover. I went there on a school field trip a few years ago. While Bergen-Belsen has an excellent museum and a few bits of the camp buildings, it mostly was demolished shortly after the war's end. Buchenwald, however, has several buildings still intact. And it's huge. Over 20,000 people were imprisoned there when it was liberated, and 56,000 died there during its eight years of operation.

And in a weird sort of revenge, the camp was used by the Soviets from 1945-49 as a prison for anti-Stalinists and members of the Nazi party. Over 7,000 Germans died there during that time.

Guard tower

The fence - several layers of spikes and barbed wire, some electrified

The buildings we could visit included the disinfection building, the storehouse where all the prisoners belongings were kept, the towers where guards kept watch, the posts that held electrified barbed wire, the crematorium complete with ovens and hooks. The rest of the place you could envision from the photos, the foundations and place markers. There were even strange, perverse places - a zoo for SS officers and their families, a brothel for inmates, a falcon yard open to the public.

Storehouse

Memorial to gypsies killed at Buchenwald

It's a heavy experience to visit a place where such organized horrors occured. I think I'm done.

I've been to the Holocaust museum in Washington DC, to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, to the two concentration camps... and each experience was a little more real. Of course it's important to remember. It's important to understand what happened and know that genocides continue.
But I don't need to visit any more camps. I'd rather remember in a way that I cannot touch or walk across.