This post is a day late.  Sorry.

Yesterday we visited Erfurt and Buchenwald.  Erfurt has a long history of trading, and it is where Martin Luther attended college and began his life as a monk.

Buchenwald was different from what I had always thought of with the concentration camps.  It was not built as an extermination camp, although it was responsible for the deaths of more than 56,000 people.  It was called a "protective custody camp," and used as a work force.  Many of the inmates had to build guns for the Nazis, and others had to build a railway which took the guns out and brought new prisoners in.  When the Allied forces liberated the camp built for 8,000 people, they found 21,000, including 900 children under 18.
While there, we saw the cell of the prison within the prison where the well known pastor Paul Schneider was held for fifteen months, the longest any prisoner stayed in this prison area.  The memorial, heated to the temperature of the human body, in the old canteen was especially eerie for me.  It made it very easy to imagine the people commemorated as being there as we learned about them.  We will remember.