I’m sure you’ve noticed that, with the ascendancy of Newt Gingrich over the past few weeks, people have started to bring to light his many foibles and flaws, just as they did with the other non-Mitt Romney GOP candidates. And there’s a lot about Gingrich for people not to like. That said, when a blogger for The Atlantic found a photo from 2009 in which Gingrich and his wife are standing in front of the main entrance to Auschwitz and said there was “something distinctly off” about it, I thought it was a cheap shot. From my experience, there are no happy tourists at concentration camps. And I don’t need to think Gingrich and his wife were happy tourists at Auschwitz in order to be prevented from voting for him.

In 2006, when I was in Germany for an academic conference on human rights, I visited the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp, where my grandfather was imprisoned for some time in the early 1940s. Although there isn’t much there, I took a lot of pictures. I wanted to show them to others, to people who wouldn’t have the opportunity to travel there, in order to explain more fully and more clearly what I had seen. Accompanying the pictures, I wrote the following letter to my family:

I have had some time to think about my experiences today and thought I would put them down before the day was over and I went to sleep.

I think that the most general thing I can say is that Buchenwald is the most terrible place I have ever been in my life. It is about a ten minute bus ride from the city center of Weimar, from the statue of Goethe and Schiller. The bus drops everyone off in front of the complex of buildings that housed the SS. They look new and are painted yellow. They now house a bookstore, information center, and education center for youth. This is on the top of a hill; the whole camp is on a hill, overlooking a beautiful valley. From these buildings, it is a short downhill walk to the main gatehouse.

The motto on the gate, like the ones on all of the gates of all of the camps, can only be read from the inside. Of course, all of the other gates said, “Arbeit macht frei”: “Work makes you free.” This one says, “Jedem das seine “: “To each what he deserves.”

Inside the gatehouse, there is very little to see. Down the hill, where the barracks used to be, there are only stones and scattered ruins. It is essentially just a desolate hillside. On my way down to the gatehouse from the information center, I had the distinct sense of not wanting to go in, of maybe staying outside. And when I went in, I didn’t go anywhere for a little while; I just stood inside the main gate looking down at the emptiness. There is a feeling that I can’t really explain, like I had to talk myself into seeing the place at each step.

Despite the general emptiness and desolation, there are a few buildings left standing inside the camp. The only building that has been left in its original condition is the crematorium. The other buildings that are still standing are a prisoner infirmary barrack (which is reconstructed and locked), the canteen (also not open), the prisoner depot/storehouse (now a museum, but originally where prisoners’ belongings were stored along with material for running the camp), and the decontamination center (which is now a museum of prisoner art). The crematorium is literally a building out of a nightmare and walking inside might be one of the more difficult things I’ve done. I didn’t take any pictures in the crematorium; I just said Kaddish and left after I finished it.

It was cold today and it rained. I can’t imagine seeing the camp on a sunny day and, in fact, my image is that the sun likely doesn’t shine on this place. The hardest thing to reconcile, I think, is that the sun does shine here and it did while prisoners were starved, beaten, experiment upon, shot, and cremated. The prisoners looked down the hill, into the valley, and on beautiful days it must have seemed so much more cruelly absurd.

Having been to Buchenwald, it all seems so much harder to believe than it was when I was listening to survivors’ stories, learning about it in school, or going to a museum. But it becomes almost unthinkable to travel here, a few miles from the Goethe and Schiller houses, and to try to imagine how people could build a place like this one, let alone how they could live in its shadow. They went to the neighborhood bakeries, they read great literature, they played with their children, they walked in the local parks. It is unimaginable to me, especially when I think that these were regular people and not devils. We want them to be monsters because only monsters should be capable of this; but that is one of the principle lessons, I suppose: regular people perpetrated these monstrous crimes and so it is regular people — us, all of us — about whom we must think. This is why we must have the language of human rights, that great legacy of the Holocaust, and it is why we must continually encourage ourselves to think of others as being like us: by expanding our sense of inclusivity and limiting our sense of exclusivity, we prevent ourselves from creating a distance between Us and Them, where others are some undesirable sort that is unworthy of the rights we hold for ourselves.

“Never Again” means more than preventing something like this from happening in the future, which is obviously vitally important. It means working harder to care about others, to make the suffering of others more real and immediate for us.

Even as it assaults the senses, even as it shocks and horrifies us, Buchenwald should strengthen everyone’s commitment to a better world, in which human rights play a more important role than they do even today. That is where I wind up tonight.

Coming back to this letter after a few years, my thoughts remain essentially unchanged. I took photos and I wrote these words because I wanted to find some way to capture that I had been there. For me, this was something personal; I was living proof that the genocidal project undertaken at this place had failed. But I think the same is true of other visitors, at least to an extent. So long as people continue to visit these places, these crimes will be remembered and future crimes like this one will be recognized and, I hope, fought against. More people should visit these sites and reflect on what they see there but because the trips can be quite difficult — both logistically and emotionally — I’m glad to have the opportunity to share my experience.[1]