Tears are Not Enough

Good Evening Herr Goethe!

                You had long conversations with Herr Eckermann on Ettersberg; you wrote many poems there, it was one of your favorite places. The fate of an oak tree, people call it your oak tree, foreshadowed the fate of Germany, so the tale goes. It was spared when the establishment of Buchenwald Camp required clearing. Nazis hung prisoners from its branches.  Inmate number  4935 watched the tree go up in flames when the camp was bombed by Allied Forces in August of 1944.

                On April 16, 1945 American military personnel, having freed Thueringen from Nazis, ordered several dozen Weimar residents to march to Ettersberg with them to see for themselves what they claimed not to know anything about: the dead - skeletons piled high - the crematorium, the barely living at Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Some turned away, some cried, some begged forgiveness. Sixteen year old Wolfgang Held was looking for his uncle who had been brought to Ettersberg for being a communist. Wolfgang cried. An inmate told him, “Tears are not enough, my boy.”

                  

             Weimar fought against naming the camp “Ettersberg” because of your connection with the area. But how can a town in which you lived for over 50 years have welcomed Hitler in its midst? Hitler stayed at the Elephant Hotel many times while his admirers, wearing their Sunday best, paraded below the balcony to greet him. Hitler never saw Buchenwald; he shunned his own creations. What attracted him to Weimar? Some say it was the conservative nature of its inhabitants.  Is Weimar conservative? Hard to judge for me, an outsider.

    

            I was afraid to take the short trip to Buchenwald. I was afraid of my emotions. But this morning I forced myself to climb the bus that would take me there. And for most of the walk through a wintery landscape that glittered with sunshine I kept the words of the tour guide away from me. I concentrated on the intense beauty of snow-sparkled beech trees. But when we reached the crematorium I could no longer ignore the voice that explained the large drum hung above the ovens.

“For oil,” she said. “Some of the corpses were nothing but skin and bones and would not burn properly. The oil kept the flames alive.”

G.

P.S. I bought Elie Wiesel’s book “Die Nacht” (The Night) at the Buchenwald bookstore. “Commemoration needs Information” says the bag it came in.  Herr Goethe, look up www.buchenwald.de and read what President Barack Obama and Elie Wiesel say about this place.

P.P.S. On the way back to Weimar I saw the following written on the wall of a building: Hope is not the conviction that something turns out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, no matter how it turns out. Vaclav Havel.