I was in Afghanistan for a year, true. But I've felt a reluctance to visit Holocaust sites for a more than one reason. For one thing, Germany is full of places I've longed to experience for years: great cities, landscapes and ancestral homes. Only recently have I exhausted the list of the places I most desired to see.
More troubling, though, was my uncomfortable relationship with Holocaust remembrance, which in my youth felt more like emotional blackmail than anything. Reading Elie Wiesel may be one thing, but recurring recitals of the horrific details of the National Socialist State's killing machine disturbed me, of course as the atrocity came into focus, yet in my youth I sensed our teachers were trying to force an emotional reaction and proud and rebellious as I was, although only passively so, I believed I knew better than to allow my feelings to be manipulated by teachers who were otherwise so uninspiring. And what did these crimes from before my parents' birth have to do with me?
But still I felt pulled to Flossenbürg, and so one week ago, on the first free weekend I had with a borrowed car I made the drive. In the nearby town of Floss is a remarkably well-preserved Jewish cemetery, one of the few reminders of what was once a vibrant Jewish community.
Arriving at the camp, I was underwhelmed by the scale of what remains. It was small and every remaining building was so sanitized. I was appalled to find a residential neighborhood encroached on the land of the former camp, with pretty little homes resting on the same ground that once supported barracks full of freezing, starving men in striped uniforms who worked in granite quarries 7 days a week until death, transfer or liberation brought relief.
The place was sickening. It was not only gloom that oppressed me, but I felt heavier in that place and nauseous until I left the grounds. There is a weight there that cannot be lifted.
What did I learn there? I had never understood the role of the Sonderkommando. The Sonderkommandos were special details of prisoners who were assigned to supervise other prisoners. In Flossenbürg German criminals were often appointed to the Sonderkommando for their brutality and supposed racial superiority. Members of the Sonderkommandos may have been bullies, administering beatings to fellow-prisoners, but many committed courageous small kindnesses and protected their fellows from the indifference or the cruelty of the guards.
Several exhibits in the museum testified to what many contemporary Germans denied: the complicity of the local populace in the construction and work of the camp. Not only did local businesses participate in the building and maintenance of the camp, but as the war brought a shortage in labor, local citizens sent written requests to the camp's commander for prisoners to be sent to dig in their quarries, harvest their crops and repair their mills.
Outside the museum a path extends down the "Valley of Death." Here there was a ramp used to take the remains of prisoners downhill to the crematory. At this site, which was neglected for many years, new remains were still being uncovered in the 1990's and there is still likely much to be learned about the work of death in Flossenbürg. The crematory is preserved, with the oven lying open in a small, empty room. I was lucky to have come in the late afternoon when there were few visitors and I could walk through this valley alone. I wept as I removed fallen leaves and overgrown branches from the faces of monuments erected by many different nations to their victims: Latvia here, Greece there. When I came to an obelisk, with memorials on one side in French, on another in Russian with hammer and sickle I thought, what is the point? Why a flag here? In spite of the symbols worn by the victims to denote their status, they were all brutalized, imprisoned and many murdered. What meaning does a flag have here? And why the Christian church next to the small Jewish "place of prayer?" Here there is only humanity. Human beings piled like wood and burned as a monument
to hate, now lying in a pyramid of ashes. And I can say I understand better than my younger self. It is awful to confront, even from the comfort of nearly 70 years, the reality of what happened here. But it is right for us to confront it, for those of us who are grown and seek to better ourselves to stand in an awful place and to feel the mass of ruin. The ruin the Germans wrought on themselves and a whole continent. The ruin they might have brought to the whole world had they never been stopped.
What will I teach my children? The value of life. It is sacred. We must not compare the worth of the elderly, the foreign, even those who work evil. They are made in God's image. They are all made in the image of God who mourns with us for the violence that fills the earth.
This week I visited some distant relatives who live in Niedersachsen. Ida is the cousin of my late paternal grandfather. Now 82 years old, I was surprised by how warmly she and her family greeted me. We sat many hours in her kitchen as I asked her and her husband about their childhood in Poland and Ukraine, about the trials of the war and their final expulsion back to West Germany in 1958. Suddenly Ida, who was only a girl when the war was over, leaned in to me and became very serious. "Have you heard what Hitler did to the Jews?"
Ida, second from right, at her father's funeral, 1945
