Day 25, March 24.

Today Katja and I met Bruce—not only was Bruce on Salt Spring Island with Sydney Banks but he lived in my original Vermont home town of Cabot a year or two before I got there.

We capped off the trilogy of German cultural history by going to the most devastating of all: Germany’s first concentration camp. It was by no means the biggest and by no means the worst but it was nothing short of horrific. It’s one thing to hear about the horrors of Nazi Germany, it’s another to see the pictures that are beyond belief, but it is altogether another to walk on that exact ground where all this horror took place and feel the energetic scent of it all.

We say there are no words to adequately describe the three principles; well, there are no words for this either, but in the other direction.

Bruce told us the words to a beautiful song he wrote about the camps—“One Suitcase”—and this was the first he visited, and his song took on new meaning for him. Then we walked back to the train in the freezing cold pouring rain, getting soaked to our skins and frozen, and I couldn’t even mind because compared to the sadistic torture and terror of the concentration camps, this was NOTHING!

Yesterday we saw a map of all the concentration camps throughout Europe and it looked like hundreds. I had no idea. Everyone needs to go to one, just for the lesson. I heard that a big Neo-Nazi faction was taking the reins of power in Kiev. Watch out everyone!