Buchenwald Tour: Courtesy of Substack Friend, "Wild Lion*esses from Jay"

An excellent columnist, Jay, shares her personal tour, as a German Citizen, of the worst crimes of mankind

Walk With Me Through a Nazi Concentration Camp: History Up Close

PLEASE watch the 45 minutes of this tour of Buchenwald.

“Wild Lion*esses from Jay” is the nom de plume of a German citizen, English speaking, who displays with journalistic gifts the core values of humanity and shares her personal tour of Buchenwald.

Suum cuique — May each person recover what is justly due to her/him.

Translated into English: “To each his own.” (I must admit, during my college years in the mid to late 60s, the saying had more to do with each finding her own path of rebellion from the Establishment.)

In German: Jedem das Seine.

And, in tyrannical cruelty, Jedem das Seine is carved on the gates of one of the worst death camps dooming little children, their loving, doting moms, their caring and providing dads.

How many little children, who should have had their fondest hopes and innocent dreams for the future were murdered by police-dog-wielding murderous guards.

How many little children looked for safety into the tearing eyes of loving moms and dads who would give all to spare their children, to husbands who would give all to spare his wife or parents, to wives who would sacrifice herself if possible to save another of her family!

The place, the meaning, the symbols were the extreme of cruelty and gratuitous sadism.

Buchenwald means the most murderous, vile place on earth.

But Buchenwald itself is a very old word and is full of innocence and beauty.

Think: The Beechwoods:

Michela Lommi on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-path-with-leaves-on-the-ground-and-trees-on-the-side-707G7QJd7JE

Now, picture this Beechwood in the 19th century, with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and other leading lights of the American Transcendental Movement walking through circa 1845 from nearby Concord, Massachusetts.

How can I be proud as an American, in wake of some of the worst crimes against humanity? The genocide of First-Nation peoples? Hundreds of years of cruel enslavement? Jim Crow? Epidemic level lynchings? Reversion today to the worst forms of Jim Crow, echoing George Wallace, Lester Maddox, cruel Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, Bull Connor with his ties to the KKK? Elon Musk with his (to put it politely) “Hail, Caesar” and idiotic waving around of a chain saw (that really should symbolize the cruel, OSHA-Violating working conditions at Tesla and SpaceX)?

How can we be proud.

Think of the Beechwoods near Concord, with the great Transcendentalists, who also were abolitionists, and with Henry David Thoreau whose civil disobedience inspired Lev Tolstoy, and through Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and through Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King. And live in that heritage.

From Transcendentalism through the Civil Rights Movement — the Great Moral Movement of Our Time — we can be proud and live that heritage.

Now back to Germany.

This is the same.

Buchenwald is your Beechwoods.

Weimar is your Concord.

Weimar was the great, new Athens of the 18th and 19th centuries.

This is the city associated with great spirits — man and woman — who lived for the humanity of each person — these were the leading lights of Weimar.

When you are flush from the beauty of “An die Freude” of the Beethoven Nineth Symphony, and you hear “Alle Menschen werden Brüder” —

Freude! Freude!

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligthum!
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Wem der große Wurf gelungen,
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein;
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,
Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer’s nie gekonnt, der stehle
Weinend sich aus diesem Bund!

http://www.mh-koeln.de/songofjoy/werke/beethoven-ode-an-die-freude/index.html

YES. This is the great song of human unity, the uniting dignity of the human soul.

This is the song of Friedrich Schiller! This is the song of Beethoven!

This is Weimar.

This is the Weimar of World Spirits during various ages such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Goethe, Schiller, Lucas Cranach (Elder and Younger), Franz Liszt, Johann Gottfried Herder, Max Bechmann, Marlene Dietrich, Friedrich Hebbel, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Max Liebermann, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer — this is an abridged, selective list.

And next to the New Athens that is Weimar, is a little Beechwood.

On the sign: Beechwood/City of Weimar. “Buchenwald/Stadt Weimar.”

But it is a twist of human history made capable only of world monsters, as Joseph Stalin was the mass butcher in the Russias and Ukraine, so was Hitler in all of Europe that genocidal mass murderer could reach, and the reach of the Third Reich was far, including in my Mom’s home country, where from a little child on my Mom’s lap I learned of the sadistic murder of her fellow villagers in Walloon (Francophile) Charleroi — teenage boys and girls sent to forced labor in the Ruhrgebiet (Düsseldorf). Two young boys, childhood friends of my Mom, escaped; hid in a neighbor’s house; in Teenage innocence, turned up the BBC radio (forbidden in the Third Reich) so loud that they were caught. They were executed by firing squad, these childhood friends, on the streets of Charleroi.

This is personal to me.

And “Wild Lion*esses from Jay” tells the story in the most compelling way, with a private tour she privileges us with by her camera and moving narrative.

I have taken my own tour of Dachau, and I will tell you that the Tour “Wild Lion*esses from Jay” gives of Buchenwald is the only and most humane and fully insightful and privileged tour to take, outside of being there personally.

“Wild Lion*esses from Jay” withholds nothing, displays everything, remembers in a moving, worthy way individual victims.

Jay takes you down photographs of little children, of moms, of dads with their little families, and all of a sudden you bump into . . .

Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote “The Cost of Discipleship” (Nachfolge Christi) in the Mid-1930s — a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount.

In the 1920s, Bonhoeffer had visited one of America’s great institutions of learning in New York: Union Theological Seminary.

That Seminary hosted Sloane Coffin and Rheinhold Niebuhr.

And, from 1933, when Paul Tillich, already on the Nazi death list, escaped, Tillich was a leading Systematic Theology professor at Union.

1938, Bonhoeffer visited Union.

Sloane Coffin invited Bonhoeffer, please stay.

This was very tempting.

Bonhoeffer decided that, after an inevitable war through the mass butcher, Hitler, Germany would need to rebuild its spiritual and cultural life, and he had to be there to lead in this rebuilding, and the only way was for him to return to Germany.

Where, Bonhoeffer went underground in a quasi-intelligence role, where he was grouped with those who attempted to assassinate Hitler.

The War ended May, 1945.

In April, two or three weeks before the end of the War, Heinrich Himmler personally signed the death sentence, and Bonhoeffer was a modern Christian martyr at Buchenwald, heartbreakingly, only a few short weeks before war’s end.

And Jay points out the “Stolperstein".

Here is one:

https://www.stolpersteine-berlin.de/de/charlottenstrasse/89/paul-bernstein

Now let me tell you just a little about Paul Bernstein.

Paul Bernstein, born 23 June 1897, was a political scientist from Berlin/Charlottenburg who circa 1931 met a young Johanna Moosdorf (12 July 1911 - 21 June 2000). The young couple, living together, were invited to supervise a home for Union-Youth. But, er, the Home required the couple to GET MARRIED. OK, makes no difference to us, because we love each other, but for form’s sake.

A few months into the marriage, the Nazi “Machtübernahme” (Take Over!) took place. SS hoisted a Nazi swastika over the Union Home.

No. The young, idealistic woman was not going to take that sitting down. So, the young Johanna went to the police and appealed to them to force the SS to pull down the Swastika flag in repair of the SS breach of peace. And Johanna Moosdorf, in her early twenties, won this little battle against the SS. This was early in the Third Reich, and the local branch of the Berlin Police made the SS pull the flag down to repair the peace of the Youth-Union Home!

In a few years, Paul Bernstein had a plan to try to escape Germany to England. His plan was to divorce his well-loved wife, with the hope of easing successive moves to England of him and his family. Bureaucratically it could go no other way.

So, a Catholic Priest was initiated into the family secret, and the family planned (with the Priest’s blessing) to go with a small perjury to the judge — OMG! The Bride had committed . . . ADULTERY! (DID NOT HAPPEN. This was for form’s sake. There was no other way. AND LIVES WERE AT STAKE!)

It was well underway, it looked good for the family, one-by-one to migrate to England, and then . . .

The Blitzkrieg in Poland. War with England, France . . . The family was stuck.

During the War, Ms. Moosdorf saved her husband more than once from even having to go to a concentration camp. The fire-breathing young lady tormented the authorities with the fact that “That Man” had to support HER KIDS. In this way, the local authorities let the Jewish husband work in the factory. When, in 1942, Bernstein was actually being sent to a concentration camp, Ms. Moosdorf came to his rescue with local authorities.

1942, Paul Bernstein was actually on the train when the megaphone yelled: “Paul Bernstein, Aussteigen!” (Paul Bernstein, Return to the Platform!)

But that was only a temporary reprieve.

September 1943, Paul Bernstein is encamped. Exact dates are unknown. The Stolperstein (Stumbling-Stone) says he was murdered in 1944. The best biographies believe Paul Bernstein was murdered in September 1943 in Auschwitz.

This is only one story.

As Jay (Wild Lion*esses from Jay) makes clear, each single person murdered at Buchenwald (and, by extension, at any of the camps) has a life story. Places like Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and the National Holocaust Museum (Washington, DC) try to recover as many of these stories as possible.

Buchenwald shares the distinction with the National Holocaust Museum of having a SHOE-ROOM.

I can tell you from personal experience, a pile of hundreds, thousands of pairs of old shoes — baby shoes, children’s shoes, women’s high heel or other shoes, men’s shoes. These shoes are open at the mouth with a gaping tongue. You feel, you sense, you believe you could almost smell the presence of the little baby’s foot, the elegant lady’s foot, the medical doctor’s foot, the university professor’s foot, the coal-miner’s foot . . .

And I can tell you, that jolts you with tears.

That, I can tell you personally.

And Jay brings that to life.

Jay brings that to life vividly.

Jay brings that to life in the only worthy-humane way.

I want to give tribute here.

This is not my work.

This is the work of “Wild Lion*esses from Jay” and she does a monumental job of bringing from across the Atlantic to your living room, as close as you can get on the screen, she brings you the experience.

If you cannot make Dachau or Buchenwald, please make the National Holocaust Museum.

Jay! Thank you!

Jay! Stay strong and continue this work.

In a day, as Jay points out, where the neo-Nazi AfD (“Alternative für Deutschland” — “Alternative for Germany”) is at 20% of the vote!! — who would have thought — we need to remember humanity, the little child, the woman, the man, we need to remember each person and protect each person.

And Jay rings this message clearly!