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.