Warning: This is going to be a bit heavy.

Hey sorry it's been awhile! I got back from a weekend with Rotary on Sunday where we visited Wiemar, Eisenach, and Erfurt. It was a great weekend. Luckily it didn't rain. (It's been raining quite a bit lately and it's rather cool again.)

We visited Johann Sebastian Bach's house in Eisenach. Our tour guide played a few pieces of music on some different musical instruments. There were some really comfortable chairs with speakers or headphones to listen to some of his music. It was nice. I also learned some interesting facts about Bach's music after his death.

Felix Mendelssohn helped bring Bach's music back into fashion so to speak. Pretty soon Bach's music reached a new height of popularity. Hitler and Goebbels were also big fans and paid homage to Bach's work. Mendelssohn however, was a Jew. He was considered "a dangerous accident in musical history who played a decisive role in rendering German music in the 19th Century degenerate." Bach's work was used the Third Reich's ideas. In Hitler's Diary before he declared his Final Solution, killing all of the Jews, he wrote the following sentence: "I listen to Bach on the radio for one hour every afternoon. One feels practically newborn, when one can draw renewed courage from the comforts of music."

However music was more deeply involved in the Final Solution process. "Already the task groups in the eastern territories had played music from loudspeakers near the ditches in front of which an in which the mass executions were carried out. Near Lviv (Lemberg, today Ukraine), at the death camp Belzec (550, 000 killings) Jews were greeted on arrival with music and song from an orchestra of 10 prisoners. In the death camps Treblinka, north-east of Warsaw (750 000 killings) and Auschwitz Birkenau near Krakow (1 million killings) prisoner orchestras entertained the SS guards. " The prisoner orchestras also performed for the SS (guards) in the camps.

"But the music was not played at Auschwitz for entertainment It was ingeniously intergrated in the destruction process. The woman's band played when the deportation trains arrived at the ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau and camp pysician Dr. Mengela and his assistants starting selecting Jews. The doctors polietly explained to the exhausted and scared people that they were in a work camp. All the while, the women's orchestra, dressed in white blouses and blue skirs, played melodies...A surviving musician reports: The deportees waved as us happily, because they thought, 'Things can't be all that bad in a place where music is playing.' Two hours after a train pulled in, most of the new arrivals had been killed, without resistance, in gas chambers disguised as showers. The rest were worked to death..."

I just thought I would share some of those quotes with you. My skin has goosebumps just reading it again. The next day we went to visit Buchenwald. To be honest I wasn't sure how I'd handle it and I was surpised with how I reacted. I thought I would have reacted a lot worse, but I have my theories as to why, but I'll get into those later.

As we drove in my legs felt completely cold. It felt like my blood was cold. We walked towards the officers barracks and hurried into one of them to watch a film. It was in German, but there were English subtitles which I was thankful for, because although I could understand the German it's nice to see it explained in your mother tongue. I think it effects you more. The movie threw a lot of facts at us and was incredibly well done. I cried, but not as much as I thought I would have. I went with an English tour guide and he took us into Buchenwald.

I was struck at how green it was. How beautiful the trees surrounding the camp were and the view of the country side. Our guide told us the trees were planted afterwards. There was also only one barrack for the prisoners. So it was hard to look and see what it actually looked like. I was also struck at how cold, windy, overcast it was.

We went into the crematorium and that was hard. I was completely disguisted to learn that there was shoot that they dumped the bodies into and an elevator to carry them up. Everything about the concentration camps and the Final Solution is completely inhumane, but some of these little details the Nazi's 'looked after' make the word inhumane insufficent to describe how utterly disguisting the treatment towards these people was. The guide told us a lot of interesting things I wish I could have filmed him so I could tell you some more facts, but I'll do my best to remember.

Buchenwald unlike Auschwitz was not used primarily to kills the prisioners on arrival. So there were no rooms with fake showers where people were killed. People were still killed at Buchenwald of course, but it was a work camp first and formost. The man in charge of the camp was apparently quite sadistic and even the other officers were scared of him. Buchenwald is quite close to the city Weimar and occording to our guide the people were aware that it existed. They didn't know that they were killing people, but there was the threat that if you don't obey Hitler and the Nazi's you could get shipped off to one of these concentration camps. Their Jewish neighbours were being taken from their homes and the Nazi's were coming back to their houses and the possessions were taken or sold.

More than 250 000 people were imprisoned in Budenwald in a total of 8 years out of which 56 000 died. (Killed, worked to death, starved to death, died from illnesses, or were vicitms of medical experiments.) Prisoners who were doctors weren't allowed to work in the hospital for the prisoners. Other prisoners, as long as they weren't doctors, were allowed to work in the hospital for the prisoners. So you can begin to imagine your chances if you got sick or hurt. Homosexuals were injected with chemicals to see if there was a 'cure' for homosexuality.

95 percent of the inmates here were from countries outside of the German Reich. The prisoners were sold to work in the German armament industry.

Our guide also told us a story about them bringing a group of Soviet prisoners and secretly killed them. Secretly was important because the Soviet's had German prisoners of war and if they found out that they had killed their captured commrades than they would start killing the German prisoners of war. They took them into the stables and put on loud music. They went one by one to see a 'a doctor' who was actually an officer in disguise. He asked them to stand against the wall so he could measure them and then went to the room next store, opened a secret window, and shot the Soviet prisoner's in the neck.

Buchenwald also sent a lot of children and sick people to Auschwitz where they met their death. Near the end of the war Auschwitz sent a lot of Jews to Buchenwald because the Russians were closing in. The Jews were put into a camp within the camp. They were completely seperated and only given half the amount of food that was given to a normal prisoner.

There was also an underground group of prioners who took over and controlled the camp a few days before the US liberated the camp. The US was the first to read Buchenwald. They came to liberate 21 000 inmates. Hundreds died every day after the liberation because help and medical services came too late.

Germany was divided into sectory. Buchenwald actually lay in the Soviet sector, but the Americans advanced faster than the Soviets. When the Soviets reached Buchenwald then the Americans left. The Soviets created their own special camp in Buchenwald with workers and prisoners afterwards. So the suffering at this site wasn't over yet.

All of the exchange students were quite quiet during the tour which is really unusual. No one made stupid jokes or comments. A lot of people asked deep and meaningful questions. I didn't cry when we were inside the camp, but my blood did feel like ice. I think that my body really prepared itself and that it began preparing itself when I first found out we would be going. We've learned a lot about the Holocaust in school and of course I've also seen a lot of movies. However when you watch a movie or read some facts in school you can distance yourself a bit. When you are there, you can't. Since the things that happend in the concentration camps were so horrible I think my mind subconciously tried to protect itself.

None of us can even imagine what that would be like and on one hand I say thank goodness because that means we've never had to experience something like that, but on the other hand I think that's scary, because that means it could happen again.

In the film we also saw a famous hotel that we'd seen in Weimar that morning on our city tour and it was from that balcony that Hitler announced his 'Final Solution.' Pretty scary stuff...and we were right there in front of that hotel and were inside one of his concentration camps. I had a lot to think about after that day.

We also visited a castle, went on a few city tours, but none of that affected me as much as Buchenwald.

Now I know that was heavy, but I had a lot I wanted to say. However now I'm going to move onto something a bit lighter. I spent a lot of time with the new outbounds next year (the German students from my Rotary district in Germany who leave on their own exchange next year.) They are with at us at almost all of our meetings. It's really neat talking to them and they are all very open. They have all of the fears, dreams, and excitment that we did before we left. I can't help but thinking where ever they go though that someone will make some sort of Nazi joke or something like that.

Ohhh and another camera accident...oh man. So my camera in the fall died. Something was wrong with the lense and they said it was too expensive to fix. Well now part of the front of my camera has fallen off and I have no idea where it is. I can't even believe it. It still works, but I have to try and get it fixed. Crap!

Oh and you'll be happy to know that I seem to have gotten the hang of the bathroom lock. Now I can get out! My German course is almost done, so pretty soon I'll have a little more time during the weeks to myself. I get home pretty place. (5:30 pm on normal school days or 2:30 on shorter school days.)

The Rotarians also announced that we are still going to get a Berlin trip. They cancelled it because someone forgot to book us a hotel and they couldn't find a hotel. Well apparently now they have found one. So we are going to Berlin. AHHHHH!!! I am so excited. There are some many Rotary things coming up. Time is sure starting to fly by.

Two friends of mine fly home on Saturday. So if you really knew me you'd know that I'm kind of sad about that because I have no idea when or if I'll ever see them again. I hope so, but you never know right?

I think I said everything I wanted to say. I hope all is well with you reader, until next time. =)