The realities of what happened here

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.