Word: buchenwalde
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Half-Melted Skeletons. Buchenwald is something of a showplace now, nine days after it was liberated, and there are certain things you have to see. There were two ovens there, each with six openings. It was a clean room with no smell. At one end was a wash basin with soap still in the dish and a door leading to the "Büro or office. At the other was a plaque hung high on the wall, black with a symbolic flame painted on it and a quotation from some German poet: "Let not disgusting worms consume my body . . . give...
...long dim room full of murmurs and movements of figures in all kinds of clothes, from the striped uniform of Buchenwald to just a sack draped over bony shoulders. The walls were lined with bunks built right up to the ceiling. The 1,500 slept four, six or eight or any number to a bunk. When it was really crowded, men slept on top of each other and the ones on the bottom, like as not, were dead of suffocation in the morning...
Awful and Unnatural. What it all boiled down to was that human life was here as nothing. Nobody gave a damn for it. Nobody gave a damn whether an inmate in Buchenwald lived or died. The SS men, if they felt like it-if they just felt like it-would kill men as they wouldn't kill an animal, they would snuff out his life as they might that of an insect which they happened to see on the road...
...Buchenwald did not have a diet, really. There was a form of soup once a day and some bread. The amount doesn't matter; it was not enough to sustain life. I saw hundreds of Buchenwald's 21,000 (there had been 48,000 but more than half had been evacuated to the interior of Germany) who were as starved as the corpses in the crematorium yard. You cannot adequately describe starved men; they just look awful and unnatural. There was nothing but their bones beneath the tightly stretched skin, none of the roundedness, the curving...
...Buchenwald is beyond all comprehension. You just can't understand it, even when you've seen it. It is terrible and beyond understanding to see human beings with brain and skillful hands and lives and destinies and thoughts reduced to a state where only blind instinct tries to keep them alive. It is beyond human anger or disgust to see in such a place the remnants of a sign put up by those who ran the place: "Honesty, Diligence, Pride, Ability . . . these are the milestones of your way through here...