Margaret Bourke-White came across one of her most difficult
assignments as she traveled across the sea to the German Concentration Camp of
Buchenwald.
Margaret Bourke-White wrote of her experience; she exclaimed, “There was an air of unreality
about that April day in Weimar, a feeling to which I found myself stubbornly
clinging. I kept telling myself that I would believe the indescribably horrible
sight in the courtyard before me only when I had a chance to look at my own
photographs. Using the camera was almost a relief; it interposed a slight
barrier between myself and the white horror in front of me.
This whiteness had the fragile
translucence of snow, and I wished that under the bright April sun which shone
from a clean blue sky it would all simply melt away. I longed for it to
disappear, because while it was there I was reminded that men actually had done
this thing — men with arms and legs and eyes and hearts not so very unlike our
own. And it made me ashamed to be a
member of the human race.
The several hundred other
spectators who filed through the Buchenwald courtyard on that sunny April
afternoon were equally unwilling to admit association with the human beings who
had perpetrated these horrors. But their reluctance had a certain tinge of self-interest;
for these were the citizens of Weimar, eager to plead their ignorance of the
outrages.”
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