I am back from Germany safe and sound, enjoyed myself but that’s not the purpose of this post. When I was out there I had quite a powerfully profound experience. Although it was not my idea, I visited Bergen-Belsen and it got me thinking……

Belsen was not set up as a camp for extermination purposes, originally a prisoner of war camp in 1940, in 1943 a section was handed over to the SS where the camp was to be used for the intention of exchanging Jews for Germans held in internment abroad. The camp quickly became overcrowded, there were not enough provisions of food and water for the detainees, poor sanitary conditions led to all sorts of disease and without proper medical treatment soon became rampant through out the camp, there was a crematorium which burned night and day to dispose of bodies, but it was not quick enough, hence the mass graves. By the time Belsen was liberated by the British in 1945, approximately 50,000 concentration camp prisoners and 20,000 prisoners of war died there.

Gee thanks for the history lesson Guy, I hear you say, but I just wanted to give a little back story before saying what I want to say.

When you first walk in to the camp you are in amongst some of the most horrific pictures I have ever seen. Human beings being treated like animals, starving, dead, scared, horrified animals. I chose not to take pictures in here as I felt it would be in bad taste. But looking around I had an enormous sense of sadness and disgust at what people are capable of doing to each other.

Walking round the actual camp was not much better, although the structures are no longer there, the mass graves are clearly marked. Again in the interest of taste and respect, I did not photograph any of these. Each of the graves gives an indication of the amount of people buried in them ranging from 500 to 1500 and it is hard to imagine so many bodies in such small areas.

Yeah Guy, you were in a bad place and felt bad, who wouldn’t?

My point is this; Belsen is set up as a memorial. It is meant to serve as a reminder of some of the dark things the human race is capable of doing, but it doesn’t. WW2 is still within living memory (the memory of people alive) and the events shocked the world, but how many times were similar events duplicated throughout the subsequent years? The Killing Fields of Cambodia, El Salvador, Uganda, even today Iraq seems to show images reminiscent of a past atrocity that disgusts most of the world.

To me Belsen is a Museum not a Memorial, not through the fault of the curators of Belsen but because of the rest of the world, we build such things to try and remind us what foul things we are capable of in the hope of never repeating them, but instead of learning by this, we do repeat the mistake time and time again. Only once humanity has learned by camps like Belsen can it truly be called a Memorial.

GI

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 10:52 am and is filed under Thoughts for the day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.