Keep working!

Our beautiful team at work :)
Now we are all back in our home towns, keeping connected and keeping the strength to act in solidarity and to spread it, against discrimination and racism.
Greetings to all, for the new school year!

Remember...

The great team doing the hard work of starting the multi-media platform!

The former Buchenwald camp

We keep remembering the huge size of the camp.
And this was only the central camp. There were hundreds more in the entire era - smaller slave labour camps, all connected to Buchenwald.

The memory

Great view from "The Tower of Freedom", over the memorial site and over the entire region.
Will stay in our memory.

Evaluation

On our last day together, we gave our hands in evaluation.

 

Did you know this method for team evaluation?

Seventh day - one more to go!

 Visiting several exhibitions in the former camp

 and memorial places

Sixth day

We continued the work on the railway path, at the memorial stones, in the restauration laboratory.
In addition, we went to the archives of the Buchenwald memorial

to understand how documents are kept, researched, connected with objects and places, used to discover stories and people.

Fifth day - an evening of debates

We all made presentations about the histories of racism, exploitation, hate crimes and, on the other hand, fights for equal rights, in our countries. Also, presentations about the projects we have made/ participated in, on similar topics.

As conclusions, we thought about ways to act in society, in order to use the dark past in order to build a better, more just present and future.

Here we show you some of our ideas.

Fifth day - morning of remembrance

 Today we visited the commemoration complex built here, in Eastern Germany, in the '50s

 "The Avenue of Nations" - symbolizing international solidarity

 "The Stairway of Freedom" - symbolizing the contribution of the inmates to the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp

 "The Tower of Freedom" - commemorating the Buchenwald Oath - an oath against nazism which was taken by the survivors of the camp, on the 19th of April 1945, 8 days after their eliberation

Fourth day - restauration work

We had again the opportunity to contribute to the history of Buchenwald:
- we did practical work, cleaning and restauring artefacts
- discovering objects from the history of Buchenwald
- making them available for further research and understanding
- learning how history is made from objects and how objects are made from histories

Fourth day - the crematorium

Going inside the camp's crematorium and learning about the complete de-humanization even in death was really a difficult experience for all of us.
It was a lesson from the past.
We want to build a more peaceful, equal and just society from this dark past.
How would you contribute to it?

Third day - carving memorial stones

 for the children deported from Buchenwald to Auschwitz

 to remember their names, to remember them as persons

 to recover a small bit of their life story

 to support the local initiative Gedenksteine - Buchenwaldbahn

It was a great experience and practical work!

Third day - starting the practical work!

We were very happy to actually contribute to the maintenance and development of the Buchenwald memorial path!
It is the path that marks the former railway linking Buchenwald to Weimar.
It is a historical reference point, a symbolic path and a commemoration ritual - this is why it is important.
We thank the local initiatives supporting it and doing the regular maintenance work for it!

Third day - the memorial for Sinti and Roma

For the Roma who were killed at Buchenwald - most of them children and youth.
What do you know about the history of Roma in Europe?

Third day - memorial stones in the camp

Did you know that all humans, when they are healthy, have the same temperature of their blood?
It is 37 degrees.
The memorial stone for all the people who were killed in Buchenwald has this temperature - to symbolize we are all the same, all human.

Third day - entering the camp

When entering the concentration camp Buchenwald, we discussed about the complex Nazi system of separating people and putting them in categories, in order to break them and to make them compete with each other for survival.
In this situation, staying human, trying to act in solidarity, were huge forms of resistance.

How is the situation in the world today? How difficult is it to act in solidarity? Is it still difficult for some people/ groups to stay human?

Third day - morning

Today we researched photos and drawings about the history of Buchenwald

- the perspectives of different inmates, 

- drawing made by inmates as a form of resistance and staying alive, 

- the photos of SS troops, 

- photos from the period after the liberation 

We realized there are so many life stories linked to Buchenwald. 

And that for most of the inmates the situation was so harsh, losing their dear ones, their identity, their power, their hopes, their posibility to be human. And, for tens of thousands, losing their life. 

Second day - evening

Returning from Weimar to Buchenwald, we took the path of the former railway, now destroyed.
We found out that the railway has been built through the slave labour of the camp inmates, many of them working to exhaustion and death.
One of the functions of the railway was to support the Gustloff Werke factory, producing weapons and using Buchenwald inmates as slave laborers.

Second day - afternoon

We went into more detail on
- how the Nazi system was organized,
- how the concentration camps were set,
- how Buchenwald was developed,
- how forced labour from concentration camp inmates was taking place almost in all entreprises
- the connections between the Holocaust, forced labour, the concentration camps and the everyday society.

In order to understand these connections, we went to the neighbouring city of Weimar.

Second Day - in the morning

We've met the entire project team, gathered from Bucharest, Wroclaw, Apolda, Berlin, Jena.
We've talked about our personal interests, our languages, our histories and how our personal family histories combine into the "big history".

First Day

We were hosted on the site of the former concentration camp Buchenwald.

On our way, we have read materials about Buchenwald, the Memorial and its exhibitions. We have discussed a bit about the history of the area and about the present day situation.

We had the 1st round of interviews about our motives to be part of the project and we have made our 1st photo selection - to illustrate our experience and feelings of the day.