Christal Cooper - 1,115 Words
Guest
Blogger –
Dr.
Stan Goldberg, PhD
Playing
For Relatives: Understanding Buchenwald
It took me
fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all.
And I did
it in a literary way.
Leonard Baskin
I thought
about my father’s family tree as I drove from Prague to Weimer. Thirty-three
relatives had died in Auschwitz, three had been liberated from Dachau, but nothing was written about
Buchenwald, the concentration camp I would visit the next day, November 11th,
2010.
It was
Veterans Day in the United States and Armistice Day in Europe. I stood just
inside the entrance and looked at the sign, which could only be read by
prisoners after they entered single-file through an iron door, giving the SS an
opportunity to formally “initiate” them into the culture of Buchenwald.
Jedem Das Seine.
The words
were elegantly twisted with art nouveau flair. “To each his own,” means
everybody gets what they deserve.
If I had
relatives who were taken to Buchenwald, they would have been on my mother’s
side. But all that I had was her Polish name before Ellis Island immigration
officials changed it. My mother was Chaya Gutheiner from Chestakova, Poland. I
couldn’t even rely on her birth date; since she changed it on her own accord,
to make herself younger.
The
Buchenwald archives listed three Gutheiners from the area surrounding
Chestakova who died in the camp. One archivist told me that there were probably
others, and since it wasn’t that common a name in Chestakova, most likely I was
related. But it would take four months to get more definitive results. I left
the office and entered the camp.
The camp
(which is in the first chapter of a novel I’m writing), took a reality that was
surreal. It was as if every object and even the ground I stood on contained
within it a history of unimaginable brutality.
All of
the 30 wooden barracks were torn down by the Soviets when they occupied East
Germany after the war, leaving only the foundations. Within them were thousands
of similarly colored stones, and occasionally a lone flower placed by a
survivor or a survivor’s family. Only two of the 22 three-story guard towers
remained. But the crematorium, with its 100-foot smokestack, was impeccably
preserved.
On the
morning I was there, a severe storm blew across Europe, forcing most visitors
to seek shelter from the wind and rain. I stood on the muster grounds and
looked to where the prisoners would gather daily to see who would work and who
would die.
I was
alone as visitors sought refuge under the roof overhang of the Cell Block, a
small building in which Russian prisoners of war were routinely killed by
injections of a “vitamin booster” after marching hundreds of miles.
With
nobody near me, I unwrapped my shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute). It’s an
instrument that I play at memorials, sacred sites, and for my hospice patients
in San Francisco. It allows me to express myself in a way not possible with
words.
As I
stood at the top of the muster grounds and looked down the slope to where the
barracks had been, I struggled to make a sound. I don’t know if my failed
attempts were caused by the emotions I was experiencing or the almost gale force
winds that blew the notes apart before they became audible. I stood with my
eyes closed and played as if notes were emerging from my flute.
Eventually,
the winds abated somewhat and I looked to my right and saw the chimney that
must have emitted my relatives’ ashes onto nearby cities whose populations
insisted they knew nothing of what was happening in Buchenwald.
The notes
started to flow, not melodiously as I had envisioned when I was given
permission to play before the trip, but with a great effort and an intonation
that could only be described as wailing. I have no idea what I played or for
how long. When I finished my last note, as if on cue, the wind and rain
stopped.
I have
repeatedly read that once you visit a concentration camp, you’ll understand how
the experience changed the lives of survivors (the theme of my novel). It
didn’t.
I spent
eight hours in Buchenwald walking among the ruins, reverently touching the
carts that hauled bodies to the crematorium, descended into a cellar those
walls were lined with hooks where bodies were hung, and walked on paths leading
to the factories and the stone quarry. I left understanding less than I did
before I arrived. How can you understand what the deliberate juxtaposition of
opposites does to a person’s mind?
It began
when I turned onto the four-mile tree-lined road to Buchenwald, aptly named
Blut Strasse (Blood Road) by the
prisoners. Thirty thousand were sent from various camps to clear the forest and
build a two-lane road and railroad bed in three months. Nobody is sure how many
returned. If any of my relatives didn’t, the official records would have listed
their death as a “heart attack,” or “natural causes.”
And as I
walked down a bucolic tree-lined path to the quarry, I wondered what the
prisoners thought the first time they emerged from the glen and saw bodies of
those who were worked to death, as they eventually would be.
I looked
at ledgers of names written in an elegant cursive style of more than 500 gay
prisoners who were infected with typhus, and I couldn’t understand how
physicians who graduated from the most prestigious universities in Germany
could impassively chronicle the course of their deaths as if they were
conducting important research.
I stood
in the zoo enclosure just outside of the electrified fence, where, after
children of the SS fed the bears chunks of meat, they glanced left and saw up
to 30,000 prisoners in various stages of starvation, then turning right, saw
and smelled the Thursday smoke rising from the crematorium’s chimney.
And even
the name of the camp, “Buchenwald,” was based on the Nazi technique of calling
something other than what it was. In English, “Buchenwald” means, “birch
forest,” something that sounds like a wonderful place to vacation.
I have
often read historical warnings that say we need to remember the Nazi holocaust,
so it could never happen again. But we do remember, yet holocausts
continue.
Stalin’s
Gulag
Mao’s cultural revolution
Pol Pot’s killing fields
Milosevic’s ethnic
cleansing
The Hutu’s and Tutsi’s genocide of each other.
And there
are others too numerous to list. It appears remembering doesn’t work. Maybe we
need to do something else—like trying to understand how a children’s zoo can be
built within sight of a crematorium.
Photograph Description & Copyright Info
Photo 1M
Auschwitz
1 entrance
Attributed
to Uri Yanover
Photograph
taken in mid-March 2002
GNU
Free Documentation License Version
1.2
CCASA
3.0 Unported License
Photo 2N
American
soldiers and liberated prisoners at the main entrance of the Buchenwald
concentration camp.
May
1945
Courtesy
of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
3O
Buchenwald’s
main gate with the moto “Jedem das Seine)
Attributed
to Emile Victor
Photograph
taken on April 29, 2007
GNU
Free Documentation License
4P
These
Jewish children are on their way to Palestine after having been released from
the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. The
girl on the left is from Poland, the boy in the center from Latvia, and the
girl on right from Hungary.
Photograph
taken on June 5, 1945
5Q
Stan
Goldberg
Copyright
granted by Stan Goldberg
6R
Memorial
for the concentration camp Buchnwald
Attributed
to Stefan Kuhn
Photo
taken on January 24, 2003
GNU
Free Documentation License
7S
Inside
the Buchenwald crematorium
Attributed
to Stephen Bell
Photo
taken on June 2006
Public
Domain
8T
Disinfection
of inmates of the Polish-Jewish special camp on the muster ground.
Autumn
of 1939
Courtesy
to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
9U
A
Russian survivor, liberated by the 3rd Armored Division of the U.S.
First Army, identifies a former camp guard who brutally beat priosners on April
14, 1945, at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Thuringia, Germany.
AP
photo
Public
Domain
10V
A
shakuhachi showing its utaguchi (blowing edge) and inlay
Attributed
to the Library of Congress
Public
Domain
11W
Stan
Goldberg playing the flute.
Copyright
granted by Stan Goldberg
12X
Creamtorium
building with it’s chimney at Buchenwald Concentraton Camp. This photograph was taken before the Nazis
added a fence around the inner courtyard.
Photograph
taken on October of 1942
13Y
Watchtower
at the Buchenwald Memorial it.
Photograph
taken on August 25, 1983
Attributed
to Jurgen Ludwig
Bundesarchiv,
Bild 183-1983-0825-303/CC-BY-SA
14Z
Stan
Goldberg
Copyright
granted by Stan Goldberg
15AA
Bones
of anti-Nazi German women still are in the crematoriums in the Buchenwald
Concentration Camp.
Date
of photograph is April 14, 1945
Photograph
taken by 3rd U.S. Army Pfc.
W. Chichersk
Source: The U.S> National Achives and Records
Administrtion, Archival Research Catalog, identifier 531260j
Public
Domain
16BB
Prisoners
construct “The Road of Blood” to the camp.
17CC
Returning
from work in a stone quarry, forced laborers carry stones more htan six miles
to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Date
is uncertain
Courtesy
of the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum
18DD
Homosexual
priosners during a roll call in Buchenwald concentration camp.
1940
USHMM
courtesy of Robert A Schmuhl
19EE
Buchenwald
zoo.
Photograph
taken by an American solier after the camp as liberated.
It
shows the gatehouse on the far right and on the left, is the house where the
bears were kept.
20FF
Graveyard
of the Soviet NKVD special camp. Nr. 2 (1945-1950) in Buchenwald.
Each
silver pole represents an unmarked grave.
Photograph
taken in June of 2006
Attributed
to Stephen Bell
Public
Domain
21GG
Location
map of Soviet Gulag system concentration camps.
Asssembled
on August 16, 2001
Attributed
to Antonu
CCASA
3.0 Unported license
GNU
Free Documentation License Version 1.2
22HH
The
Chinese People’s Liberation Army is the great school of Mao Zedong Thought.
A
1960 poster from the Cultural Revolution, featuring an image of Chairman Mao,
and published by the People’s Republic of China.
Soure: Stefan R Landsberger Collecton on Chinese
Propaganda Poster Pages
Fair
Use Image
23II
Tuol
Sieng Musuem: Photos of the victims of the Khmer Rouge.
Public
Oomain
24JJ
Serbian
President Slobodan Milosevic attending a meeting in Belgrade.
September
9, 1996
Attributed
to SSGT Lance Cheung, USAF on behalf of the United States Federal Government.
Public
Domain.
