大象传媒

Buchenwald

One day whilst off-duty, we had the opportunity to visit the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. The 24th April 1945 was a warm spring day with sunny spells. There was to be a ration run to the nearest American Army supply depot in the vicinity of Weimar, passing the concentration camp newly liberated by the U.S. forces. Of course, I had heard of such places, but the name Buchenwald meant nothing to me save that the word (meaning in English "Beech-tree Wood") conjured up in my mind a beautiful wooded landscape. Indeed this promised to be so as we drove through the lovely countryside.

However grim portents of the true nature of the name appeared as we approached the place. Groups of pathetic figures, some dressed in striped uniforms, others in rags or partly in striped uniforms and partly in ragged civilian clothes, appeared on the roadside. All were painfully emaciated. We were to discover that these ex-prisoners, waving to us as we passed, represented the fitter ones, just able to consider launching out on their own. We parked the Fordson outside the camp's main gate, a single storey building stretching along the barbed wire fence. At the centre of the building was a wrought iron gate in which was worked the ironic inscription "Jedem das Seine" meaning "To each his own". No doubt, the derisive humour of this legend had not been lost on the newly arriving prisoners. The right-hand wing was the camp guardhouse and the left-hand contained the punishment cells. Beyond the gate, there was an open space, used for roll-calls, and to the rear the barrack huts, fifty or more, fanned out inside the double barbed wire fences dotted with watch towers every fifty yards or so. Conditions in the huts were terrible. The prisoners slept on four-decker bunks, which stretched on both sides of each hut, from one end to the other. I estimated that each hut could have held a thousand prisoners, thus the total capacity of the camp was about fifty thousand men, women and children. Since being liberated, many prisoners had left the camp. Others, perhaps wiser or those too sick or weak to travel unaided, remained free in the place of their former confinement.

Small groups of local Germans were being escorted around the camp, the women weeping and the men stoney-faced. They claimed that they knew nothing of what had happened in the camp, a Polish Jew informed me, adding, "It's possible but not likely". Indeed at that time there was an expression in the German language, "Watch out, otherwise you will be going up the chimney". This showed an awareness of the ultimate fate of most inmates in the concentration camps, succumbing to brutality and overwork and being incinerated in the camp crematorium.

On that April day, the crematorium in Buchenwald was not in operation. Its function had been halted by the liberation. To the rear, the bodies of the dead inmates were stacked in two huge heaps just as they had been laid out on the day when the SS guards had fled. We took a photograph of the scene. When on holiday some forty years later, I returned to the same place. Preserved as a memorial to the dead victims, the camp had been cleaned up but remained as a sad reminder of human wickedness.

To return to that first visit, my attention was drawn to the message painted on the wall of one of the buildings. "Hitler muss sterben, damit Deutschland lebt" pleaded the writer, "Hitler must die so that Germany may live". Six days later Adolf Hitler committed suicide in the F眉hrerbunker in Berlin.

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