Yesterday, President Obama visited the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany—the first U.S. president to visit this camp.
At Buchenwald alone, an estimated 56,000 innocent Jewish men, women and children were murdered by the Nazis during World War II.
If it is possible to even say so, perhaps a relatively “small number” compared to the obscene numbers of Jews murdered at other camps: Auschwitz, 1,400,000; Treblinka, 870,000; Belzec, 600,000; Jasenovac, 600.000; etc., for a sickening total of more than seven miilion!
In the gas chambers at the end of the “Road to Heaven” at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland, approximately 250,000 Jews, including some of my recent ancestors, were cruelly murdered.
I do not believe that any of my relatives lost their lives at Buchenwald.
Nevertheless, seeing the poignant images the President saw, and hearing and reading the emotive words he spoke during his historic visit to Buchenwald, sent chills down my spine.
Witnessing the sinister Nazi crematory ovens of the concentration camp.
Glancing at the odious barbed wire fences that held thousands captive until their certain and horrible deaths.
Looking up at the camp’s clock tower—its clock frozen at 3:15 to mark the moment of the camp’s liberation by the U.S. Army in the afternoon of April 11, 1945.
Commenting on the most unusual memorial to the camp survivors, a steel plate that is heated to the temperature of the human body, a reminder, according to Obama “…where people were deemed inhuman because of their differences — of the mark that we all share.”
And, finally, parts of Obama’s formal adddress:
More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished. I will not forget what I’ve seen here today.
We are here today because we know this work is not yet finished. To this day, there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened — a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful. This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts; a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history.[…]
Also to this day, there are those who perpetuate every form of intolerance — racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, and more — hatred that degrades its victims and diminishes us all. In this century, we’ve seen genocide. We’ve seen mass graves and the ashes of villages burned to the ground; children used as soldiers and rape used as a weapon of war. This place teaches us that we must be ever vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others’ suffering is not our problem and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests.
[…]
And it is now up to us, the living, in our work, wherever we are, to resist injustice and intolerance and indifference in whatever forms they may take, and ensure that those who were lost here did not go in vain. It is up to us to redeem that faith. It is up to us to bear witness; to ensure that the world continues to note what happened here; to remember all those who survived and all those who perished, and to remember them not just as victims, but also as individuals who hoped and loved and dreamed just like us.
Commenting on Mr. Obama’s historic visit to Buchenwald, the New York Times said this:
Indeed, it was Buchenwald, perhaps more than anywhere else, that embodied the contradiction of a civilized society’s descent into organized barbarism. The camp sits just a few miles outside Weimar, one of the country’s leading cultural centers.
Image: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza. (President Barack Obama places a flower at a memorial at Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp. With the President are German chancellor Angela Merkel, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel)
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.