ASF Seminar in Poland

We set off at the end of May for a seminar with ASF in Poland. The ten-hour train journey from Berlin to Katowice gave me a chance to catch up with the rest of the volunteers and to try my luck at hangman in German (I didn't do very well).

We spent the first part of the week at the International Youth Meeting Centre near the Auschwitz memorial site in Oswiecim. Instead of going straight to the Auschwitz site, we first spent a full day visiting the city itself and getting to know its history. I had visited Auschwitz by myself once before, but like a lot of people, I just went there for a day from Krakow, so it was nice to see a different side to the city. We visited the castle in the city centre, as well as the old synagogue and Jewish cemetery.

The next morning we went to Auschwitz I, the smaller of the two main camps, and the one containing the exhibitions. It is a very hectic place to visit. There are so many people that individual visitors aren't even permitted in until after 3pm. Instead, you have to be part of an organised group with a guide. To stop the guides all having to shout over each other in different languages, you also have to listen to them through earphones.

As you go around the exhibitions, each group has to find a bit of space for itself and you're constantly being pushed along by the waves of visitors coming through each room. All in all it makes for a very rushed experience. You have no time to just stop for a minute to properly absorb what you're being told or what you're seeing in front of you: huge rooms piled with suitcases, shoes, glasses, clothes, all taken from people as they arrived and before they were murdered. There's hardly a moment to even attempt to comprehend the scale of the horrific crimes that took place there.

We went to the much larger Auschwitz II-Birkenau site on the following morning. By contrast, we were virtually the only people there, at least when we first arrived early in the morning. We had a short tour with the same guide from the day before and then spent a long time walking around the site, this time getting the chance to take everything in at our own pace.  

By the end of these two days I was wrecked, and it was the first time I genuinely felt that I had had enough of dealing with the Holocaust and the other related topics. Though I had been working in Buchenwald for almost a year at that stage, there is still a very different feeling and atmosphere in Auschwitz, where at least one million people were murdered in the most clinical way.

Luckily, the next morning we took the train from Oswiecim to Krakow, where we got to spend two days exploring the city. One of the volunteers from our group comes from Krakow, so we got to see plenty of interesting places off the beaten track.

This is a short post, but I'm into the last week of my programme now and trying to get everything finished off before I head home!    
  

The Anniversary of Liberation

Buchenwald was liberated by the US 3rd Army on 11 April 1945.

In the preceding days, the SS had attempted to 'evacuate' the camp and send as many prisoners as possible on so-called 'Death Marches', thus following through with the overall policy of the Nazi state in its dying months to ensure the Allies found no people in the concentration and extermination camps.

Thanks to the impotence of the SS by April 1945 and resistance from the prisoners (who knew they stood a better chance of survival by remaining in the camp to await liberation than by setting out on foot on an aimless journey through a country on the verge of arguably the most 'total' of defeats the world had ever seen) there were 21,000 prisoners still in the camp when the American army arrived.

That morning, the SS had been ordered out of the camp in an attempt to escape the advancing Allies, essentially leaving Buchenwald in the hands of the remaining prisoners. At 3.15pm, some of these prisoners stormed the main gate and watchtower, flew a white flag and announced 'Kamaraden, wir sind frei!' ('Comrades, we are free!') over the loudspeaker.

Such were the conditions in the camp that, despite the best efforts of the US army doctors, approximately one quarter of these 21,000 prisoners died of malnutrition and disease in the initial weeks following liberation.

The liberation of the camp and the suffering endured by those who were imprisoned and died there is commemorated at the site each year - this year for the 67th time.

On Wednesday the 11th, the actual anniversary, there was a fairly low-key 'memorial tour' led by the chief historian and other employees of the site, where we paused for a minute's silence at each of the memorials to the different groups of prisoners.

The more official five-day programme of events then began on Friday morning, with the arrival of the former prisoners and their family members from all over the world.

I had been involved here and there in the preparations since November, helping to translate invitations and programmes into English, etc, but for the actual events I worked to accompany the English-speaking guests along with some colleagues.

In the English-speaking group there were 4 survivors accompanied by family members. Two of them come originally from Hungary and moved to Australia and America respectively after the war and one comes originally from Poland, and moved to England after the war. The fourth comes from California and was in Buchenwald as a prisoner of war.

We left Weimar at 4am on Friday to go to Frankfurt airport to collect some of the guests and bring them back to Weimar, where they were staying in a hotel in the city. After a few hours of running around the airport, we eventually managed to meet everyone and were back to Weimar that afternoon. Once everyone was checked in, the guests were left to relax and try to get over their jet-lag before the busy few days they had ahead of them.

I spent some time on Saturday morning in the archives with one of the survivors, as he looked through the records about himself and his father, who was imprisoned in Buchenwald at the same time as him. It was fascinating but also very sad to be there as he also looked at a list of the other people from his village who were also deported to Buchenwald and other concentration camps.

Even more moving was the visit we made later to the site of the former quarry, where prisoners worked as slave labourers in appalling conditions. We were there for about an hour, just listening to two of the survivors telling us their stories - from the time of their arrest to their liberation. I can't imagine the amount of courage that must be needed to be able to come back to a place like this, even after such a long time, that inflicted such suffering on them.

On Sunday the main commemoration ceremony for the victims took place on the former 'roll-call square', where the prisoners had to stand every morning and evening for roll-call. The ceremony itself lasted about an hour and included speeches from representatives of the survivors in several different languages and the laying of wreaths by many different groups.

There was some controversy in the days afterwards as some spectators at the ceremony had been flying the old East German flag. As I've mentioned before in this blog, the ruling SED party in the DDR completely hi-jacked the Buchenwald site as a way to legitimise its own undemocratic rule, and while it of course cannot be compared to the 'Third Reich' in terms of ideology or brutality, that state was still a dictatorship so it's quite disappointing (to put it mildly) to see people still using the suffering of hundreds of thousands of innocent victims for their own completely unrelated political ends today.

Two film screenings took place over the few days too. One was a film about a Czech prisoner who worked to protect the lives of hundreds of young boys in Buchenwald, most of whom survived their time in the camp, and the on-going campaign to have him included as a 'Righteous Among the Nations' at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Two of those boys he protected were present and spoke about their experiences. The second film told the story of a group of Western Allied pilots who were brought to Buchenwald after crash-landing in occupied France in 1944. One of the survivors I was accompanying, the man from California, was in that group and spoke to the audience afterwards, and had even brought with him a spoon that a prisoner from Poland had made for him at Buchenwald.

Other survivors also gave talks to school students and the public, telling people their stories and answering questions about their experiences and some others made individual visits to former sub-camps of Buchenwald in villages and towns in the area. 

The whole period felt like so much more than just a week at work and it was an absolutely fascinating and moving experience to be able to spend some time with the survivors and their families and get to know them on a more personal level. It was so sad to hear their stories, but also impressive to consider how many of them succeeded in re-building their lives from nothing, often at a very young age and in new countries to which they arrived alone without a word of the language.  

The last three months

I haven't updated my blog in a long time, so this post will hopefully sum up what I've done over the past three months!

After the Christmas break, I got down to the proper work of preparing for giving guided tours of the memorial site. This involved reading through the exhibition catalogue (the main introductory source to most aspects of the history of the concentration camp) and then coming up with my own concept for a tour.

Being honest, this prospect was quite a nerve-wracking one, knowing how complicated the history of Buchenwald is and how emotive and controversial it can be for each visitor or group of visitors in different ways. I have no personal connection with the Holocaust, so no matter how much I study or engage with it as an issue, it will only ever be that: something I have studied from a certain distance or remove. Many of the visitors to the site have grand-parents or great-grand-parents who were persecuted by the Nazi regime, or come from places where the effects of Nazism can still be felt, so there are naturally many sensitivities about how the history of the site is interpreted and presented.

Add to this the size of the site (almost 200 hectares), and the sheer amount of information there is to get through, and suddenly the 90 minutes allocated for the tour doesn't seem so long.

After numerous corrections, revisions and complete re-starts, I finally finished writing my tour by the end of February. I will initially only be giving tours in English and if this goes well, I'll try it in German too in the future. There's not as much of a demand for tours in English as I had thought, but I have an arrangement with the information office whereby I can give tours to individual English-speaking visitors as they turn up and if I'm free. I gave my first tour to an American couple last week and really enjoyed it. Doing it on a smaller scale means I can talk to the visitors a lot more and we can tailor the tour to suit their particular interests.

To return to January, we spent the last week of the month in Berlin at the annual Youth Meeting of the German Parliament, the Bundestag. It was attended by 80 young people from Germany and abroad, many of whom, like ourselves, also work in memorial sites. We spent a week examining many of the different issues in relation to Nazism and how it continues to play a role in the world today.

Speed-dating at the start of the Youth Meeting to help us get to know the eighty new faces!

We were based for the week in the Reichstag building itself and the complex of buildings surrounding it. There really couldn't be a more perfect place to be to engage with twentieth-century German history. The Reichstag had been the seat of the German parliament in the years before the coming to power of the Nazis and they exploited a fire started in the building by a communist in the weeks after Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 as a way to consolidate their power and stamp out opposition to the new regime. The Berlin Wall used to run directly behind the Reichstag and since Reunification the building has been completely renovated and once again hosts the parliament of a unified Germany. One of the features maintained in the renovation is graffiti left by some of the Soviet soldiers who captured the Reichstag during the battle of Berlin in May 1945.

For the week we were divided into themed work groups and I chose the one focused on the memorial culture surrounding National Socialism in Germany today. Our group visited many of the larger memorials in Berlin, including the well-known and controversial Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime and the memorial for the Sinti and Roma victims of National Socialism, which, despite twenty years of debate, is still a building site. However, we also visited smaller, more local memorials throughout the city, many of which were erected much earlier than the 'official' ones.

With the whole group, we visited the Sachsenhausen memorial site and the Jewish Museum, where I took part in a workshop examining original documents dealing with how life for Jewish people changed in the immediate aftermath of the Nazis' coming to power. We also visited a synagogue and held a discussion with a Holocaust survivor.

The programme was very packed and we were all wrecked at the end of each day, but we always had a bit of free time in the evenings so we were able to catch up with the other ASF volunteers based in Berlin.

The event ended with us attending the 'Gedenkstunde', or 'memorial hour', that takes place each year in the Bundestag chamber on 27 January, the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism. The ceremony itself was very simple, with some music and addresses by the president of the Bundestag and a survivor of the Holocaust.

Beyond this, I have continued to work in the archives and the visitors' information office, as well as doing translations and helping out here and there around the site. In the middle of April there will be a five-day programme of events to mark the 67th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp. I'll be working to take care of the group of English-speaking former prisoners and their families for the duration. I think it will be a fascinating experience to accompany them as they return here and spend some time getting to know them on a more personal level.

I have also just returned from a preparation seminar for this year's ASF summer camp at Buchenwald. All loyal reader(s) of this blog will know I was a participant in this summer camp last year before I started working here, and this year I will be working in the camp as a 'teamer' (as they call it!). The seminar itself was a great way to meet about 40 other ASF volunteers from Germany who are currently on placements across Europe, Israel and the USA and who will be 'teaming' the dozens of other summer camps this year.

I think that pretty much summarises my work since Christmas. The weather here has really picked up over the past few weeks - I was beginning to wonder in February if I would ever see the end of the snow - but spring has thankfully finally arrived.

Since Christmas, I have visited Leipzig and Munich (to visit the volunteers living there) and am looking forward to spending Easter in Hamburg. I am now beyond the half-way point in my volunteer service, but there is thankfully still plenty more to come!