[www.buchenwald.de...] -- On Thursday we spent most of the morning at Buchenwald, the former Nazi concentration camp—just about a week before President Obama’s planned visit to the same site. Between 1937 and 1945 about one-quarter of a million people were imprisoned at Buchenwald, with more than one in five of those prisoners meeting their deaths here. We prepared ourselves for this visit by reading Elie Wiesel’s Night. Wiesel, then 15 years old, spent the last few weeks of the war at Buchenwald. Thursday was overcast, and as we got off the local bus, the wind blowing across the hill was cold. Kerstin P. led us in a prayer before we entered the camp. On Friday, we shared some of our reflections with each other—shock, anger, disbelief. What, we wonder, would our own actions have been as prisoners, oppressors, or bystanders?

We choose to represent this visit by a single photo: the camp's main gate with its cyncial motto "To each according to his merits."