Beach Wood

2006-09-27T01:36:00.000-07:00

Imagine you are living with 2000 other people in a stable meant for 50 horses with mud covered all over the floor and are living merely with half a litre of soup which is supposed to feed more than 7 people in a bowl which you use it for night latrine. There are corpses lying all around with repugnant stench of rotting bodies and human excretament. The only thing that separates you from the rest of the world is a barbed wire fence where death is imminent on either sides. In short a place worse than hell.

It was one of the most pleasant days in Germany, Bright and sunny considering the unpredictable weather which is as unpredictable as the Indian cricket team. Me, and some of my friends from the University of Erfurt had been on a day trip to Weimar, one of the most beautiful cultural centres of Germany that was home to two of the most talented and popular literarians of all times namely Goethe and Schiller. But neither did Goethe or Schiller know that the places they loved so much would bear a permanent stain on its beautiful gown. This stain is called Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp which is located nearly 15 kilometres to the north of Weimar town centre. The pleasantness of the day lost its effect after I visited that place.

This camp which started as a detention camp for Soviet Prisoners of war in 1938 swiftly turned into a Nazi butcher house where nearly 50,000 people were murdered between the years 1938 and 1945. The people who suffered most in these camps were the Jews, Romany Gypsies, Jehovah’s witnesses and the POWs from Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, etc in that order.

The camp had a Typhus experimentation centre where Jews were used as guinea pigs to test the anti Typhus drugs. People who were not able to work were killed with lethal injections. People having tattoos were specially selected and murdered in order to make collectable from their tattoo skins. Some of the highly priced collectables were table lamps made from human skins and shrunken heads of Soviet POWs.

Among the worst of these camps was the camps Little Camp which consisted of three small stables where most of the Jews in the camps were dumped into. Most of them died due to starvation and disease and the few who survived were put to hard labour because of which many died dude to exhaustion. They were even used to experiment of various drugs and vaccines.

There is a Crematorium with three furnaces which was running day in and day out to burn the dead. The crematorium had a cellar where the bodies were dumped and those half alive were strangulated by hanging them with ropes tied to meat hooks. Around 1,000 people were killed this way.

Although most of the camp is obliterated but some of the building have still survived like the crematorium and some have only their foundations left.

As you enter the camp you can see the words ‘Jedem das sein’ written on the grills of the gate in metal. This means ‘Everyone gets what they deserve’. Surely the Nazis got what they deserved. Most of the SS Officers posted here were found guilty of murder and were sentenced to be hanged until death by the new German government.

Not everyone who was put in these death camps was killed. There was a resistance being formed internally without the knowledge of the SS. They struck when the allied forces were close to Buchenwald. Many survived. The camp is supported mainly by the survivors and their descendants.

This camp stands as a testimonial both for the extent of human cruelness and greed as well as the defeat of the same.

The Visible Void

Beach Wood