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!

Our second ASF seminar in Berlin

It turns out that the trains in Germany don't always run on time. As Lena and I set off at the end of November for our second ASF seminar in Berlin, we had no fewer than three delays and did at one stage end up going back through Weimar, having left it over an hour beforehand.

After this (and spending another while wandering through the streets of Berlin looking for our hostel...our own fault this time), though, we did arrive just as everyone was sitting down for dinner so we weren't too bad off.

Above all, the seminar was a great opportunity to catch up with all of the others. As I mentioned before, we are a group of 18 international volunteers living and working throughout Germany, and while we of course keep in touch on Facebook, it was good to have the whole group together again - and for the first time since our introductory seminar in September.

We started the seminar that evening by each presenting one or two photos that symbolised how our initial impressions of Germany had changed over our first three months of living there. I chose a map of Germany to show how the naive idea I had in September that I would spend my weekends travelling around the country visiting all the different cities had gone completely out the window once I got here and realised how big it actually is (and how expensive it is to travel around).

It felt a bit odd saying that in a room with several people from Russia (earlier that day, while we sat waiting for one of our many trains, Lena had said 'Germany is so small!') and the United States, but I suppose I can't help the fact that I come from a small island!

The following morning, we broke into small groups and each had the opportunity to present our work to the other volunteers. I really enjoyed hearing what the others do, because, while some of them also work in memorial sites, many are doing things that are completely different. For example, there are people working in the ASF office, others who work with elderly people and there is one volunteer in a youth club. Despite the variety of work however, we're all experiencing the same issues in terms of settling in and finding our feet in a completely new environment.

We spent one day visiting the House of the Wannsee Conference, exploring many of the issues relating to anti-Semitism and the Final Solution. The exhibition at the site is excellent, charting the history of anti-Semitism in Europe and helping to explain what led to the ultimate decision to exterminate the entire Jewish population of the continent.

That day ended with a visit to a synagogue for a Friday-evening service, which, as many in the group remarked afterwards, was quite refreshing after spending so long speaking of Judaism in the past tense. The exterior seemed a bit unwelcoming, with two police standing at the door and another keeping an eye on the security cameras (something which I have often seen outside the synagogue near my house in Dublin on a Saturday morning too) - a sad reminder maybe that some things haven't changed - but once we got inside, the atmosphere could not have been more different.

It was my first time ever inside a synagogue; I have to admit that the one I just mentioned near my house is somewhere I have passed thousands of times, but have never actually considered going in to. I immediately felt very welcome, with many people asking us where we were from and what we were doing in Germany and there was a group of old men sitting nearby who kept showing us where we were in the prayers and hymns, even though it was all in Hebrew anyway!

There was also a great sense of community: everyone was catching up with friends after the week's work and finding out all the news and gossip, just like many people do in Ireland after mass on a Sunday. As someone who is quite critical of religion in general, this gave me a different perspective on the role it can play in people's lives in terms of bringing them together with their neighbours and creating a sense of belonging.

And religion is a theme that came up again and again throughout the seminar, in particular when we talked about the meanings behind some rituals and festivals (mainly Christmas and Hanukkah, given the time of year) and the ways they are celebrated throughout the world.

Unlike our first seminar, this time we did everything through German. It was difficult at times, and I found myself getting quite tongue-tied when speaking in front of the whole group, but there was definitely a determination among those of us who had mostly spoken English in September to stick to German this time.

In comparison to the first seminar, which was geared primarily towards providing us with an introduction to the whole programme and our work, this seminar involved dealing with a much broader range of topics. As well as everything I've mentioned above, we also talked about many other things, including the concept of 'identity' and how we label ourselves and other people, the issues around how our perspectives of our own lives can change over time and even the most feared topic of all: what we're going to do once our volunteer service is over.

It was strange to be thinking of what comes next already when it seems like we've only started, but as I thought about it on the train home (perfectly punctual this time, thankfully) I realised I've been here for almost four months now and I'm well beyond the stage of 'just starting'!

Nothing in particular

It's a long time since I've posted here, and I suppose it's partly because, since my orientation phase finished up at the end of October, I've just settled into my weekly routine, with each day not being as exciting or new as during the first few weeks. That's not to say that things have got boring though - it's more so that we now have the time to devote to the specific things that we want to work on.

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.

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.

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.