Amblog - A (photo)blog through Europe

Natzwiller-Struthof, 3/02/2012:

Friday was the day I had been dreading. We visited a concentration camp on maybe the coldest day of the year. I was worried about myself physically (we would be standing outside for upwards of 2 hours) but also mentally, since Holocaust museums are always hard to deal with.

My first impressions of Struthof, the smallest central concentration camp, were ones of cold. With a forecast of -20 C, I was bundled to the extreme and I still deeply felt the cold. I couldn’t imagine how the prisoners, dressed only in pajamas and shoes, if they were lucky, could have survived the winter.

These first two photographs show the camp from the outside. Struthof was not destroyed by the Nazis at the end of the war and thus remains mostly intact, including the gate and barbed wire. Simply walking through that gate felt very much like stepping back into history, into a time when my people were persecuted and the world was in chaos.

The second photograph says (roughly): Lantern of the Dead. Here, on the order of the central Nazi concentration camp, Natzwiller-Struthof, are the ashes of the cremated deportees. This sign is posted just before the entrance to the camp as a note to those who died here. This is just one of many onsite memorials and remembrances to those who died and suffered at Natzwiller-Struthof.