Weimar: Buchenwald
The Historian

By this time we were, I believe, suitably humbled. We no longer entertained delusions of how great and wonderful our spiritual contribution must be to all with whom we crossed paths.

And this was Weimar, where I began weeping shortly after we entered the region, and could not raise my mood above desolation until we left it again.

Buchenwald was a study in sophisticated propaganda, the only place in East Germany that we ever saw someone sweeping streets or clearing ice. The museum was stunning and the movie, which was shown to all visitors including ourselves and the aloof Russian tourists, was a polished, cinematic docudrama. Here we learned how the Fascists -- East German company included -- were overcome and defeated by the Russian resistance fighters.

Buchenwald was, in fact, the only site of a successful overthrow (Sobibor, Poland, represented a different kind of victory).

Later, we were guided through the camp by an official Tour Guide, a German historian who was sixteen when the German army was retreating through this region in the wake of the American and Russian armies.

When he realized that we were both Germans and Jews traveling together, and also that we were not there to make him a soulless pawn in our preconceived notions, his tone -- and his stories -- took on a new flavor. His last story was about himself as a sixteen-year-old boy, sitting with his father in the horse-drawn lorry that was still transporting many people in 1985 (the year we visited). They were waiting for a large procession of prisoners, herded by German soldiers, to pass them at a crossing. Later he was to learn that this was one of many Death Marches devised by the retreating Nazis toward the end of the war. The intent, it's been supposed, was to empty and blur the purpose of the concentration camps, and to divest themselves of prisoners over a less concentrated area by marching them to death.

As the historian and his father waited, a prisoner stumbled and fell just in front of them. Immediately after came a Nazi officer's car. Its wheel drove right over the man's head, and the two men watched as his skull was crushed.

Our group was stunned and silent. The man's tone had been soft, and the story sounded fresh, as if it had not been repeated very often. It was this subtle observation that filled us with respect and compassion for our gentle guide. I cannot remember what, if anything, was said after that. Later, we prayed that some sense of rest, some sense of closure, would come about for this man by the telling. It was clear he had been carrying that image with him for forty years, and perhaps had chosen to be a historian because of it.

As we looked back on the day, we began to see inklings of what our true impact might be if we would just listen, if we would just allow things to be other than what we expected, if we would just be honest with ourselves and others.

Treblinka I
Artists

Poland, springtime, and a raw, true, creative impulse. These arrived together as we crossed the border from East Germany. Small white patches of snow remained in shady areas, nestled in a countryside bursting with green.

While the Germans honored the memory of concentration camps with museums, the Poles gave them parks. In the parks we often found sculptures, and many of them filled with spirit, truly inspired. We all preferred the atmosphere of these places over the comparatively sterile memorials to the west. Much less tidy, history became more visceral, candid, even raw. I once found a piece of striped cloth, and another time, a human bone.

Dietrich and I are artists, and today we talked about art as we walked together in the pine-wooded outskirts of what had once been Treblinka. We stood on the edge of an unnatural, shallow bowl, now smoothed over by the tall, sun-dappled grass. We knew from our intensive education over the last weeks that this had once been a mass grave, though now dug up and the bodies moved.

Hitler had been a painter. Some of the resentments he harbored toward the Jews are attributed to the fact that art dealers of his day and place were primarily Jewish, and they did not respond enthusiastically to his work. I had seen his watercolors in a museum exhibit when I was a teenager. I didn't think they were so bad, and had already seen worse work receive great recognition.

Dietrich talked about his resentments toward the Jewish art dealers and collecters. To him they seemed to have a gift of sight -- a flare for spotting the great works -- he didn't believe he could attain, and so envied. He had seen the art collections of famous Jewish collectors, and hated them.

As he spoke, I felt my arrogance well up in me, and the sacredness of the place and the moment helped me to admit it out loud, as I believe it helped him to hear it with grace. I talked about my contempt. Learned as a child, then chosen as an adult, I felt a superiority -- indeed, a supremacy -- toward the Germans. I looked frankly at my thoughts and feelings and saw that in all things intellectual, creative and intuitive, I had been looking gleefully down on the German people.

Odd, when next to me stood a formidable talent... An artist in all things, whose passionate and concentrated vision burst out of even the most mundane chores.

I don't remember if we resolved it aloud, in a prayer or in an exchange of forgiveness. Something did change in that moment, however. We became more genuinely brother and sister, the glow around us deepened, the nearby wound in the earth softened.

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