Lest we forget....
An excerpt from Frederick Forsyth`s brimming-with-brio autobiography, The Outsider. Here, Forsyth is on a guided tour of the Buchenwald concentration camp, some years after the war. Alongside the author, there are schoolchildren also visiting.
An excerpt from Frederick Forsyth`s brimming-with-brio autobiography, The Outsider. Here, Forsyth is on a guided tour of the Buchenwald concentration camp, some years after the war. Alongside the author, there are schoolchildren also visiting.
Beech in German is buchen and a wood is called a wald. So
when the Nazis built a concentration camp in the middle of it, they called it Buchenwald,
a place of unredeemed horror.
I noticed that the guides never used the word Nazi and never ever the word German. Those responsible had been the `Fascists,` even though the Fascists were the Italians. The strong
impression being dunned into the children’s brains was that the Fascists had in
a way, as if from outer space, simply arrived, performed their inhumanities and
then been hounded out to take up residence in their new natural home, Bonn, the
capital of West Germany. No one queried this nor mentioned that it as actually
the Americans who liberated Buchenwald, not the Russians. The whole lecture was a
communist tour de force.