Struthof

I've spent half my educated life listening to history lessons about the Holocaust and reading books written by survivors. When I was in the 9th grade, I even heard a survivor--Joseph Hirt--speak to my school about his experience and his escape from Auschwitz.

But yesterday morning, I found myself inside a concentration camp for the first time, and it was a chilling experience. I saw the crematorium with my own eyes. I saw the rusted metal hooks where SS guards would hang the political prisoners without fanfare, and I saw the noose where they would execute people while the whole camp was forced to watch. I saw the memorial graves, and if I had looked deeper into the black forest that lies past the barbed-wire fences, I might've seen the ghosts.

Struthof (also known by the German name, Natzweiler-Struthof or just Natzweiler) is the only Nazi-established concentration camp located in present-day France. It was built specifically for "Nacht und Nebel" ("Night and Fog") prisoners, a label used mostly for political rebels and captured resistance members whom the Nazis wanted to disappear. 

A little history: set up in 1941 as primarily a work camp, Struthof differed from the more infamous Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps where thousands were sent to the gas chambers. Although there was a gas chamber at Struthof, it wasn't used for mass exterminations, and most deaths were the result of hangings, hunger, medical experimentation, and exhausting work in the nearby quarries. Over 50,000 people are estimated to have been prisoners at Struthof, 22,000 of whom died there. Although it was liberated in November of 1944, there was little left to save as the camp had been evacuated and prisoners sent on a death march two months earlier in September.

My first impressions of the camp? To be honest, even though this sounds awful, the location of the camp is beautiful. There was a strange juxtaposition of beauty and tragedy at Struthof.



Overlooking the roll-call gathering place and the site of public hangings

Barbed wire fence

It is perched on top of one of the Vosges Mountains, and it has a fantastic view of surrounding mountains. The air up there is fresh and crisp, although in the winter it is apparently quite bitter. Yesterday was also a gorgeous autumn day: finally sunny, and with thousands of yellow dandelions trembling in the cool breeze, it just didn't feel like a good morning to be at a concentration camp. In the camp's museum, it was said that the pretty mountain scenery gave a little hope to the prisoners, although the fact that the camp is built on a side of a steep hill wore out those who were already weak and exhausted from labor and malnutrition.

Don't get me wrong, though: the camp itself and all the atrocities that occurred there are far from beautiful. The atmosphere of Struthof is very somber and a little creepy. Most of the barracks were burned down by the neo-Nazis after the war, but the double barbed-wire fences (although they are no longer electrified), the watchtowers, the crematorium, and the cell block where medical experimentation took place still remain. 

The thing that made me tear up was listening and seeing how coldly scientific the camp was set up: how the Nazis placed drains in the floors of the torture rooms and tilted the lab tables in the experimentation rooms so that the prisoner's blood could be easily filtered away; how the heat produced from the burning bodies in the crematorium was used to heat the water for cooking and bathing; how those doomed to be publically executed were given less food as to not waste bread on the almost-dead.

Overall, the experience felt a bit unreal; for me, it was a little hard to grasp how much suffering went on at the camp just by being there, although the guide's poignant words and the fact that I stood a meter from the incinerator did make my heart break a little. Seeing hundreds of earthenware jars filled with the ashes of anonymous prisoners really hurt as well, much more than the statistics of how many died on the ground where I stood.

In the history books, the Holocaust is often thought of in numbers--there were a hundred thousand Russian POWs at this camp at this time, six million Jews in total were slaughtered, two hundred thousand mentally and physically disabled people were secretly euthanized in this year--but we sometimes forget that those numbers were actually people, breathing, starving, suffering human beings. The statistics horrify, but it is the stories of the survivors and the remnants (the pictures, the possessions, the ashes) of those who didn't survive that really haunt you.

The Monument to the Departed