In fact, one of the things I am finding the most challenging is learning how to manage my time properly as I have nobody peering over my shoulder and virtually no deadlines to meet. We work here as volunteers and, apart from a few things like working in the information office, there is very little that we HAVE to do, so it is up to us to make what we want out of the year.
And with so many different projects that I want to work on, I initially found myself like a bit of a headless chicken sometimes, running between all of them and getting nothing done, though I think I'm getting better now at disciplining myself to focus on one thing at a time!
I have spent much of the past few weeks transcribing a set of interviews in English with former prisoners of Buchenwald who were children or teenagers when they were in the camp. While it took a long time, and while transcribing can be a very monotonous process, it was both fascinating and sad to hear the stories directly from the mouths of the people who experienced them.
In general the interviewers would let the men just speak freely about their experiences, but it was sometimes frustrating when they would butt in with a question and interrupt the flow of thoughts - I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been for the men to talk about these events which, as well as being horrific, happened over sixty years ago.
In terms of gaining an understanding of the brutality of what happened, I had the same feelings when I was doing this work as I do when I'm in the archives: the sheer scale of the Holocaust makes it impossible to contemplate the human aspect of the suffering, but by hearing individual stories, I think we can begin to get a better sense of just how awful it really was.
One man spoke of a time when he was living with his family in a Ghetto and they were told that they had to choose one member of the family to be sent for deportation. Not knowing what would happen to the person chosen, they agreed that his older brother would go as he was the most likely to be put to work and not murdered (by this time there were rumours of gas chambers beginning to reach the Ghetto, he said) and thus had the best chance of survival.
Another spoke of how he and many others he knew got sick in the weeks after liberation because they ate more food than their systems could handle at the time. They had become so used to having almost no food, and they couldn't believe how much they now had, that they ate as much as possible in case it would be taken from them.
On the 9th of November, the anniversary of Reichspogromnacht (or Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass), we participated in a ceremony to commemorate the German Jews who, on this and the following days in 1938, had their property and synagogues destroyed and who were rounded up en masse and sent to concentration camps as a means of intimidating them into leaving Germany.
Our role was to read out quotes from some of the men who were sent to Buchenwald at this time; I read out two quotes, one in English and one in German. Needless to say I was quite nervous about having to read something like this out loud at a commemoration ceremony, and we spent most of the preceding two days rehearsing our German pronunciation.
Thankfully it all went well, and the ceremony itself was quite simple and informal. As well as the quotes we read out, the head of the memorial site and the site's chief historian spoke about the events of November 1938 and the mayor of Weimar laid a wreath at the location where temporary barracks were erected to house the men brought to Buchenwald as a result of the pogrom. Ceremonies like this took place all over Germany on the same day and I saw wreaths and flowers in many different towns and train stations over the following weeks.
Towards the end of November, I spent a full day working with a group of school students from England who were visiting Buchenwald as part of a trip through Germany. I accompanied them on a tour around the site and spent the afternoon running a workshop with some of them about the use of photos as sources on the history of the camp.
I found that the students were very engaged in the issues and were far more willing to contribute their opinions than I ever was when I was fifteen. While this was of course only one group, I was happy with my first experience of working with the students and this has encouraged me to work a bit quicker at putting together my own tour, so that hopefully I can start doing it more often myself in the new year.
Other than this, my life outside of Buchenwald has been greatly enriched by the arrival of glühwein and waffles at the Christmas market a few weeks ago and I am happy to report that the freezing German winter that I have been dreading since September hasn't arrived...yet.
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