Why?

The question I'm most often asked about what I'm doing is 'why?'

Why would someone with no connection to the Holocaust (and virtually no German) choose to move to a small city in East Germany to work as a volunteer in a former concentration camp?

It's a fairly simple and obvious question, but unfortunately there isn't a simple and obvious answer.

I started looking into what I was going to do after college about a year ago. I considered all the options - continue studying, travel, try to find a job or internship, or go on the dole - but none of them seemed right for me. My classmates and I had spent the first three years of college joking about how unemployable we'd be with degrees in history and political science. But as we started into final year it suddenly hit home: for the first time in our lives there wasn't an apparent 'next step' to be taken.

The thoughts of looking for a 'real' job or of facing into more study made me want to fail my exams so I'd have to repeat. I started looking into the European Voluntary Service (EVS), an EU programme that allows young people to live and work as volunteers abroad, in both member and non-member states.

Literally the first project that caught my attention while I was searching through the mind-boggling EVS database was the very one I'm on now. I was studying the Weimar Republic at the time, so the simple fact that Weimar was listed as the location made me take a look. A year working in Buchenwald concentration camp memorial: it was intriguing, but not really what I had in mind at the time, so I continued looking.

I found a few other interesting possibilities and started looking into them, but Buchenwald had somehow lodged itself in the back of my brain and I kept finding myself reading over the details again and again. I've always found Germany fascinating. Here's a country that went from jingoistic monarchy, through experimental republic and fascist dictatorship, to economic powerhouse in the space of a lifetime, and all while still finding time to give the world Albert Einstein, Bauhaus and Haribo.

Much of our focus in college was on how countries choose to remember and interpret their own histories and the role this plays in forming a society's sense of identity. There is arguably no country with a more troubled history than Germany, but also none which has done more to face up to its past. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this is exactly what I wanted to do.

The programme is run by Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (translated into English as Action Reconciliation Service for Peace), an organisation founded in 1958 by some members of the German Protestant church who felt that they had failed to provide resistance to the Nazi regime. They wanted to ease the suffering of the victims of National Socialism and work to ensure that they are never forgotten. ASF also works across Europe and the USA to fight against racism, anti-Semitism and neo-fascism.

I sent in my application in January, was called for interview in Berlin in February and found out a few weeks later that I'd be heading to Weimar in September...and the rest is history!