Witnessing and Speaking the Unspeakable

At times, silence is uplifting and soothing; other times, silence is heavy and disconcerting.

During the month of June 2022, the silence my wife and I heard at a Concentration Camp was louder and at more decibels than screaming.

Our feeling of stillness and heartbreaking contemplation was upsettingly punctuated by gunnery firing and loud detonations at an adjacent German military range.

My wife and I were confronted with countless invisible images passing into our thoughts as we stood before successive mass graves at the Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp filled with innocent Jewish men, women and children, prisoners of war and those who met criteria for all Nazi Concentration Camps, Jews and anyone for any unimaginable reason who were classified as an undesirable to the Nazi’s.

The Bergen Belsen Museum and headstones on the grounds including Anne Frank’s, left no doubt in our minds that the administrators here are determined to maintain detailed testimony and testament to all the victims. We were deeply moved not only by the vast exhibit but by encountering German teenagers immersed in taking notes as they stared with concerned eyes at the photographs and descriptions of the atrocities.

We were reassured to know that it is mandatory for all German school children to visit a Concentration Camp.

A month before traveling to Germany, Destination Peace presented an online program entitled “A Survivor Speaks: An Unforgettable Hour with Marion Blumenthal Lazan, a Child Survivor of the Holocaust. Despite her brutal time as a child in Concentration Camps including Bergen Belsen, she focused on how the survival of humanity requires unity and kindness.

A tour guide during our bus trip from Bergen Belsen said “at least we can say something good about the Nazi’s. They did build the Autobahn.”