This weekend the group went to Weimar to experience the beautiful quaint little town, drink the delicious beer, see the world famous Bauhaus museum and go to Buchenwald, one of the most notorious concentration camps in Germany.
I decided to walk it by myself knowing that I wouldn't be able to experience it with anyone else. I started out in the crematorium, walking in unknowingly. Although I had a map, I hadn't yet looked at which buildings were which. The first door I walked through, there was a sink styled operating table with a drain attached to the end. I assumed this was for the cleaning of the dead bodies. Don't know why they would even bother cleaning them though, because in the next room I saw a row of crematory ovens. This wasn't even the worst part. Walking into the dark cellar, I noticed, among plenty of dead flowers, a wooden chute beginning upstairs. Upon reading the little plaque on the wall, I learned that this was where dead bodies were conveniently dumped, out of sight. This was also where they displayed the giant industrial style crate where the dead bodies were hauled around the camp by the other prisoners. In the next room I found hooks hanging toward the ceiling on the wall. This is where the Nazis hung prisoners to be strangled.
The rest of the camp was pretty desolate. All of the barracks were destroyed. Some of them still had traces of the building walls but none of them were fully intact. Instead, their original places had been marked with black rocks, the streets marked with grey rocks. One of my favorite parts of the site was the original fencing. The posts of the fence were still there but they no longer had the barbed wire that towered over the heads of the prisoners. Now they were open so that visitors (and wild animals, I'm guessing) could roam freely between the forest and the fencing.
The best part was meeting this little guy who was lounging in front of one of the art exhibits.
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