Friday, June 30, 2006

Experiencing Buchenwald Concentration Camp. I will not forget!!

The picture looks out across where the muster ground was to the depot (big building) and the disinfection station to the right of it.

"It was Sunday, yes, a beautiful Sunday in March. One life later, many lives and many deaths later, I stood there again in the dramatic empty space fo teh muster ground of Buchenwald. The birds had returned, the same wind blew over the Ettersberg. As I contemplated the landscape, I felt my whole life spreading out before me in memory, becoming transparent with its dangers, its misconceptions, the blindness of its ideological illusions, its stubborn striving for knowledge and clarity."
Jorge Semprun, speech held on the occasion of his receipt of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1994. He was an inmate of Buchenwald from 1943-1945 and went on to be a politician and writer.

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