I previously mentioned the positive work atmosphere that I have noticed in the memorial site. However, this isn't to say that working here is always easy, or that there aren't things that I find difficult about being here every day.
What has struck me is that I have not found myself being too affected by seeing places like the crematorium or the disinfection facility. I think these are places we all expect to see in concentration camps, so I suppose I was prepared for them to a certain extent.
There are, however, three places within Buchenwald that I find particularly difficult to reconcile and when I visit them I really begin wondering about how the people who worked here could actually do what they did to fellow human beings.
The first is in the building which now houses the administration for the site as well as the library and archives and it is where I have my lunch most days. As far as I am aware it was originally used as an SS accommodation block, but there is something about the main corridor along what are now offices that makes me think about how, in one way, the Holocaust was a very bureaucratic and clinical process.
I can imagine faceless civil servants sitting in offices poring over train timetables and planning transports across the concentration camp network, like they were moving cargo, and I think of how many of these people claimed innocence after the War; they were only paper-pushers carrying out orders, they didn't do anything wrong.
The second place is the collection of enclosures that made up the Buchenwald zoo. It was built using money stolen from prisoners (which was officially recorded as a 'donation') for the entertainment of the SS and their families. It was built directly outside the prisoners' camp, with a clear view of what was going on on the other side of the barbed wire fence.
When I visited this part of the site with a group of students, one of them asked the guide if this was meant as a way of taunting the prisoners. She said that she didn't think so. Rather, based on what former SS men said after the war about how they enjoyed their time at Buchenwald, her interpretation was that the SS just thought so little of the people who were in the camp that they had no problem enjoying themselves with their families on a day out to the zoo, regardless of how close it was to the concentration camp.
The third is a collection of houses in the forest that made up the SS-Führersiedlung, where the camp's commander and other top SS men lived with their families. The houses are beautiful, built in an idyllic forest location, and yet not far away at all was the quarry, where prisoners were made to do back-breaking work for twelve hours a day with no breaks. Like with the zoo, I don't know how people could carry on an outwardly 'normal' family life in a place like this.
I spend quite a lot of my time working in the archives, which I find really interesting. They get hundreds of requests each year from relatives of former prisoners looking for information about their experiences here. We, the volunteers, help by doing the preliminary searching through the microfilm and printed records of transport lists, daily roll-call figures, prisoner information cards, etc.
Up to 250,000 people were imprisoned here at one time or another between 1937 and 1945, a number so high that I think it is difficult, if not impossible, to relate to the human element of the suffering they endured. But when I look at one person's individual experience of Buchenwald, or of the Nazi persecution regime in general (many prisoners were brought here from, or were later sent to, other camps), I find that I can relate much more to it.
I find myself getting quite involved with each individual case that I research in the archives, and I really want to find as much information as possible for the family as I think that even seeing the name of their loved-one on a form or piece of paper can bring some sort of comfort.
There were 250,000 prisoners here, but no two have the same story - each single person had their own families, their own jobs and their own lives that were taken away from them, and each person had a different experience of Buchenwald. I think that is by focusing on personal stories that we can better understand just how terrible the events of the Holocaust really were.
Sunday 23 October 2011
Settling in and meeting my new best friend: Google Translate
Before I started working here, I naively thought that one year was a long time and that I'd really have an opportunity to get to know the place very well. But after working here for six weeks now, I can't believe I ONLY have a year to try and learn as much as possible and make some contribution to the work of the memorial site.
The history of the site is very complicated. It opened as a concentration camp in 1937 and operated as such until its liberation by the US army on 11 April 1945. This is, of course, the most significant part of its history, and the one which on which I will be focusing the most.
But after the War, Buchenwald was used by the Soviet Union as 'Special Camp Number II' to intern thousands of people who had been involved in the Nazi regime or who had been members of the NSDAP, as well as thousands of innocent people who were wrongly suspected of being Nazis.
In 1950, the East German authorities decided that the process of De-Nazification should be ended and the camp was closed, re-opening soon afterwards as a memorial site. However, the official historiography of the DDR claimed that the camp had been 'self-liberated' by the secret communist resistance that had operated within Buchenwald throughout the camp's existence, so instead of commemorating the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Nazi regime, the site celebrated the glory of these 'anti-fascist' resistance fighters.
Needless to say, the story of the site as Special Camp Number II was completely ignored during this time, and it was only after German Reunification that proper research could be carried out about it and the rest of the history of the camp in general. Throughout the 1990s all the exhibitions were completely re-designed, and the memorial site has since attempted to present an accurate and balanced interpretation of the history.
So not only does the camp itself have a complex history, its time as a memorial does too.
We have spent the past six weeks in our so-called orientation phase, to allow us to get to know this history and the actual site itself which, as I mentioned in a previous post, has an area of 190 hectares.
I have visited all of the exhibitions, gone on tours and taken part in workshops with school students, visited the library and archives and spent countless hours just wandering around the site, trying to build up a mental map of where exactly everything is (or was).
I have also been given the catalogues which accompany the exhibitions on both the concentration camp and the Special Camp, which detail their histories in full. I don't think I have ever read anything more slowly in my life. I sit and read them at my desk, with my dictionary open on one side and Google Translate on the other, and poor Marlene is driven demented with my constant requests for her to clarify the meaning of a word or sentence.
We have also had to write weekly reports of what we have done and learnt and what we thought of the different exhibitions, tours, etc. I begin by writing them in English and can get one done in about an hour or two, but then have to spend about twice as long translating them into German, with my old friend Google.
But it works both ways; being a native English speaker means I am often in demand for translating work too. I have translated letters and invitations sent to former prisoners living in the USA, England and New Zealand for the ceremonies to mark the anniversary of liberation in April, and I will be working to take care of them when they come.
I am also transcribing a series of interviews with English-speaking former prisoners that will form part of a research project and I am translating some new information signs that will be put up in Ohrdruf, a former sub-camp of Buchenwald in a nearby town.
I found the first two weeks or so very tiring as I had to shake off the cobwebs from my summer holidays. Things also get going in Germany much earlier than at home - we were expected to be in work for 8am on many mornings, and myself and Lena are also doing a German course two evenings a week in Jena, a city near Weimar.
But by the end of the first six weeks, things have settled down a lot and I'm feeling quite at home at work and in Weimar in general. We have got to know the other volunteers and interns quite well and this has made settling in much easier.
By now German is coming much more naturally to me too. As you've probably gathered from the amount of times I mention it, language was the thing that was most worrying me before I came here. However, after only a few weeks it has become completely normal to speak German. Of course I make thousands of mistakes every day and I can still only speak very basic German, but nine out of ten times I can get the jist of what someone is saying and I think they eventually understand me most of the time!
Now the only thing worrying me is the snow, which we are promised could arrive any day now. I've been told that once it comes it's here to stay until about February, so I've already invested in a big new coat and I'm thankful that the heating in my apartment is quite good.
The history of the site is very complicated. It opened as a concentration camp in 1937 and operated as such until its liberation by the US army on 11 April 1945. This is, of course, the most significant part of its history, and the one which on which I will be focusing the most.
But after the War, Buchenwald was used by the Soviet Union as 'Special Camp Number II' to intern thousands of people who had been involved in the Nazi regime or who had been members of the NSDAP, as well as thousands of innocent people who were wrongly suspected of being Nazis.
In 1950, the East German authorities decided that the process of De-Nazification should be ended and the camp was closed, re-opening soon afterwards as a memorial site. However, the official historiography of the DDR claimed that the camp had been 'self-liberated' by the secret communist resistance that had operated within Buchenwald throughout the camp's existence, so instead of commemorating the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Nazi regime, the site celebrated the glory of these 'anti-fascist' resistance fighters.
Needless to say, the story of the site as Special Camp Number II was completely ignored during this time, and it was only after German Reunification that proper research could be carried out about it and the rest of the history of the camp in general. Throughout the 1990s all the exhibitions were completely re-designed, and the memorial site has since attempted to present an accurate and balanced interpretation of the history.
So not only does the camp itself have a complex history, its time as a memorial does too.
We have spent the past six weeks in our so-called orientation phase, to allow us to get to know this history and the actual site itself which, as I mentioned in a previous post, has an area of 190 hectares.
I have visited all of the exhibitions, gone on tours and taken part in workshops with school students, visited the library and archives and spent countless hours just wandering around the site, trying to build up a mental map of where exactly everything is (or was).
I have also been given the catalogues which accompany the exhibitions on both the concentration camp and the Special Camp, which detail their histories in full. I don't think I have ever read anything more slowly in my life. I sit and read them at my desk, with my dictionary open on one side and Google Translate on the other, and poor Marlene is driven demented with my constant requests for her to clarify the meaning of a word or sentence.
We have also had to write weekly reports of what we have done and learnt and what we thought of the different exhibitions, tours, etc. I begin by writing them in English and can get one done in about an hour or two, but then have to spend about twice as long translating them into German, with my old friend Google.
But it works both ways; being a native English speaker means I am often in demand for translating work too. I have translated letters and invitations sent to former prisoners living in the USA, England and New Zealand for the ceremonies to mark the anniversary of liberation in April, and I will be working to take care of them when they come.
I am also transcribing a series of interviews with English-speaking former prisoners that will form part of a research project and I am translating some new information signs that will be put up in Ohrdruf, a former sub-camp of Buchenwald in a nearby town.
I found the first two weeks or so very tiring as I had to shake off the cobwebs from my summer holidays. Things also get going in Germany much earlier than at home - we were expected to be in work for 8am on many mornings, and myself and Lena are also doing a German course two evenings a week in Jena, a city near Weimar.
But by the end of the first six weeks, things have settled down a lot and I'm feeling quite at home at work and in Weimar in general. We have got to know the other volunteers and interns quite well and this has made settling in much easier.
By now German is coming much more naturally to me too. As you've probably gathered from the amount of times I mention it, language was the thing that was most worrying me before I came here. However, after only a few weeks it has become completely normal to speak German. Of course I make thousands of mistakes every day and I can still only speak very basic German, but nine out of ten times I can get the jist of what someone is saying and I think they eventually understand me most of the time!
Now the only thing worrying me is the snow, which we are promised could arrive any day now. I've been told that once it comes it's here to stay until about February, so I've already invested in a big new coat and I'm thankful that the heating in my apartment is quite good.
Tuesday 4 October 2011
Starting work - the first week
The Buchenwald memorial site is located on the Ettersberg mountain that overlooks Weimar, about 8km from the city centre. The concentration camp was opened in 1937, in what had been a beautiful forest ('Buchenwald' means 'beech forest') with spectacular views over the city and the surrounding countryside. The road up to the site was once a narrow path through the forest which was widened in the early years of the camp's existence by prisoners working in horrific conditions - so many of them died in its construction that it immediately became known as 'Blutstraße' or 'Blood Road', a name by which it is still known today.
My first-day nerves were made worse when I found out that I would be thrown straight in at the deep-end: running the visitor information office with the three other volunteers.
Thankfully Marlene and Fabian had started a week before us, so had done it once before, but it was a little bit strange answering visitors' questions (in my terrible German) about a place I had only started working in that morning.
We work here every Monday, as most of the staff of the educational department have Mondays off because they work at weekends. Unfortunately all of the exhibitions are also closed and there are no guided tours, meaning that all the visitors can do is walk around the site themselves with a map and an audioguide. This works well in certain places, but Buchenwald is a 190-hectare site with very few original buildings still standing, so I do wonder how much the Monday visitors can really learn about it.
This also means that on Mondays my job involves apologising to a lot of disappointed (and sometimes angry) people and then asking them to give me their driver's licence as a deposit for the audioguide.
On the plus side, working here is great for my German. I have memorised a few important phrases for giving directions, explaining how the audioguides work, etc, but other than that I am left to answer all of the other questions in German as well as I can. The phrase 'necessity is the mother of invention' comes to mind fairly often as I attempt to answer the more complicated questions - I can always eventually find a way to explain what I have to, which has given me more confidence in speaking the language. The information office is also one of the rare occasions I get to speak English, as we get quite a lot of American visitors and other international visitors who can speak English but not German.
If Tuesday was a reminder of how some things really are the same everywhere, it also showed how different they can be. First, myself and Lena had to register as residents of Weimar. We were told that for me as an EU citizen it would be straight-forward. But then we entered the maze of bureaucracy and queuing that is the Weimar city administration building. Each person we met told us we needed to go to a different place with different forms and wait outside different offices in a building that can't have been built by anyone other than the Stasi. It was eventually sorted, of course, and I'm now a fully-registered resident, but it was interesting to see that some problems aren't confined to Ireland.
Second, we went to open new bank accounts. The first bank we went to wasn't interested in opening accounts for us because we'd only be here for a year - I tried to imagine a bank in Ireland turning away new business, but I wasn't able to. We then went across the road to Deutsche Bank who told us that they'd give us both free accounts for the year, but that there was nobody there at the time to open them, so we had to make an appointment to come back that evening.
On Tuesday afternoon we got to see our new office - three of us will share one office and one will share another with an intern. They are in a building that used to house some of the SS men, but which is now used to host workshops and events with groups of school students and young people. I wasn't expecting to have an office at all, as in general our work will involve us being in many different areas and working with different people all over the site, but it was a nice introduction to the very impressive set-up they have here, and in Germany in general, for volunteers and interns.
I have met at least ten other volunteers and interns working here in various capacities and for varying lengths of time. While the compulsory year of national service was recently scrapped in Germany, it is still very common for people to complete several internships or periods of volunteer services as part of their studies or just for the experience.
And they're not just here to do the photocopying either; many of them are involved in putting together exhibitions or working on the events for the anniversary of the camp's liberation. This also means that there are a lot of other young people working here, which has made settling in and getting to know everyone that bit easier.
Later that week, we began going around all the weekly departmental staff meetings to introduce ourselves and meet the other people who work here. For me this was quite intimidating at first, sitting around a table with ten to fifteen others (some of whom have worked here for up to thirty years) introducing myself in German, and then trying to remember all of their names and what they do here, before doing the exact same thing again twenty minutes later at another meeting down the hall.
There are a lot of people working here, in a variety of areas, from historians, librarians and archivists to those working in the educational department. One thing that I can say about all of them, though, is that they've gone out of their way to make us feel welcome and help us settle in.
The rest of the first week was mainly spent organising keys and e-mail addresses and the like, but I was absolutely wrecked by Friday evening, having met so many new people and after spending my first full week speaking nothing but German.
One of last year's volunteers told me that, despite the place you work in and the topic you have to deal with on a daily basis, you can really enjoy working here. This sounds a bit strange at first, but I can now understand what she meant.
Of course the place itself is a constant reminder of how low humanity can descend, but the people who work here now are so passionate about their work - learning as much as possible about the camp's history, teaching as many people as possible about it, and doing as much as possible to ensure that what happened here is never forgotten - that the atmosphere is in fact a very positive one.
By the end of the first week, all of my concerns about working in a place like this were gone and I was looking forward to starting again on Monday morning.
My first-day nerves were made worse when I found out that I would be thrown straight in at the deep-end: running the visitor information office with the three other volunteers.
Thankfully Marlene and Fabian had started a week before us, so had done it once before, but it was a little bit strange answering visitors' questions (in my terrible German) about a place I had only started working in that morning.
We work here every Monday, as most of the staff of the educational department have Mondays off because they work at weekends. Unfortunately all of the exhibitions are also closed and there are no guided tours, meaning that all the visitors can do is walk around the site themselves with a map and an audioguide. This works well in certain places, but Buchenwald is a 190-hectare site with very few original buildings still standing, so I do wonder how much the Monday visitors can really learn about it.
This also means that on Mondays my job involves apologising to a lot of disappointed (and sometimes angry) people and then asking them to give me their driver's licence as a deposit for the audioguide.
On the plus side, working here is great for my German. I have memorised a few important phrases for giving directions, explaining how the audioguides work, etc, but other than that I am left to answer all of the other questions in German as well as I can. The phrase 'necessity is the mother of invention' comes to mind fairly often as I attempt to answer the more complicated questions - I can always eventually find a way to explain what I have to, which has given me more confidence in speaking the language. The information office is also one of the rare occasions I get to speak English, as we get quite a lot of American visitors and other international visitors who can speak English but not German.
If Tuesday was a reminder of how some things really are the same everywhere, it also showed how different they can be. First, myself and Lena had to register as residents of Weimar. We were told that for me as an EU citizen it would be straight-forward. But then we entered the maze of bureaucracy and queuing that is the Weimar city administration building. Each person we met told us we needed to go to a different place with different forms and wait outside different offices in a building that can't have been built by anyone other than the Stasi. It was eventually sorted, of course, and I'm now a fully-registered resident, but it was interesting to see that some problems aren't confined to Ireland.
Second, we went to open new bank accounts. The first bank we went to wasn't interested in opening accounts for us because we'd only be here for a year - I tried to imagine a bank in Ireland turning away new business, but I wasn't able to. We then went across the road to Deutsche Bank who told us that they'd give us both free accounts for the year, but that there was nobody there at the time to open them, so we had to make an appointment to come back that evening.
On Tuesday afternoon we got to see our new office - three of us will share one office and one will share another with an intern. They are in a building that used to house some of the SS men, but which is now used to host workshops and events with groups of school students and young people. I wasn't expecting to have an office at all, as in general our work will involve us being in many different areas and working with different people all over the site, but it was a nice introduction to the very impressive set-up they have here, and in Germany in general, for volunteers and interns.
I have met at least ten other volunteers and interns working here in various capacities and for varying lengths of time. While the compulsory year of national service was recently scrapped in Germany, it is still very common for people to complete several internships or periods of volunteer services as part of their studies or just for the experience.
And they're not just here to do the photocopying either; many of them are involved in putting together exhibitions or working on the events for the anniversary of the camp's liberation. This also means that there are a lot of other young people working here, which has made settling in and getting to know everyone that bit easier.
Later that week, we began going around all the weekly departmental staff meetings to introduce ourselves and meet the other people who work here. For me this was quite intimidating at first, sitting around a table with ten to fifteen others (some of whom have worked here for up to thirty years) introducing myself in German, and then trying to remember all of their names and what they do here, before doing the exact same thing again twenty minutes later at another meeting down the hall.
There are a lot of people working here, in a variety of areas, from historians, librarians and archivists to those working in the educational department. One thing that I can say about all of them, though, is that they've gone out of their way to make us feel welcome and help us settle in.
The rest of the first week was mainly spent organising keys and e-mail addresses and the like, but I was absolutely wrecked by Friday evening, having met so many new people and after spending my first full week speaking nothing but German.
One of last year's volunteers told me that, despite the place you work in and the topic you have to deal with on a daily basis, you can really enjoy working here. This sounds a bit strange at first, but I can now understand what she meant.
Of course the place itself is a constant reminder of how low humanity can descend, but the people who work here now are so passionate about their work - learning as much as possible about the camp's history, teaching as many people as possible about it, and doing as much as possible to ensure that what happened here is never forgotten - that the atmosphere is in fact a very positive one.
By the end of the first week, all of my concerns about working in a place like this were gone and I was looking forward to starting again on Monday morning.
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