By Nik Alatortsev
A winding road in the hills south-west of Strasbourg is taking us through the rich forests and past ancient villages to the first visit of the trip. It is not a secret installation belonging to NATO, nor a villa where an important summit of the EU once took place. Our destination is a former Nazi concentration camp, the only one of its kind to survive on French territory.
After finally making it up the winding hill-road, we emerge on a parking lot that could well belong to a campsite; the countryside around is so peaceful and pure. Yet in front is the newly-built entrance and museum complex, situated just outside the former camp; the top floor contains the ticket desk and stalls detailing each of the main Nazi concentration camps in Europe, while below, around a newly-excavated cellar no-one is quite sure of the purpose of, is an exhibition narrating the rise and fall of Nazist regimes in Europe.
But we cannot linger there for too long - there are things to see inside the camp grounds, too, even though a large part of it was destroyed in a fire started by a Neo-Nazi group who tried to erase all memory of this location in the 1960s or 70s. Four of the former 20 or so barracks remain, though most of these are special-purpose ones and were not used to house the internees day-to-day. At the top, one of the remaining blocks contained the kitchens, while the other used to contain the exhibition now shown in the entrance building.
It is the two surviving blocks at the bottom, however, which are the most harrowing. One of them was used as a 'prison within' for those internees who broke the rules of the camp, while the other was used to cremate the bodies of those who died or were executed. The cells in the 'prison' block have been preserved as they would have been while the camp was operational - including the tiny 'solitary confinement' spaces, too small to stand up or stretch out in. The cremation block, in the meantime, contains the implements used to carry out medical experiments on the internees, and the execution room, with its floor sloped down to the drain; the most moving, though, is the cremation oven that still stands in front of the entrance to the block.
Below, between the two blocks at the bottom, are memorial placards to just some of the people who never returned from the camp. They face the large memorial, built in the late 1950s and unveiled on July 23rd, 1960, commemorating all the French resistance fighters who were interred and perished in Nazi concentration camps. But it was not only the members of the French resistance movement who perished at Struthof - people from all over Europe were interred there, primarily because of their political opinions, but also perhaps because they belonged to the 'wrong' racial group in Nazi eyes. Most would have been forced to work in the quarries or forests, both of which are plentiful in the area. Of the 52,000 or so of those who went in, about 22,000 never left alive.
I believe the visit to Struthof was a worthwhile - if harrowing - experience, as it showed us what Europeans faced in the aftermath of the Second World War, and helped to see why the urge for European integration was felt so strongly then. It can only be hoped that the lessons of history - especially those as devastating as the lessons of Nazism - are not forgotten in squabbles over fishing quotas and subsidies to farmers through the CAP.
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