Who recently toured Buchenwald with Elie Wiesel?
At the Buchenwald concentration camp Friday afternoon, President Obama spoke about the lessons of the Holocaust after touring the camp with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. “If these trees could talk,” Wiesel said to the president on their tour of the camp, which sits on the northern slope of Ettersberg mountain, five miles north of Weimar. “We saw the ovens, the crematorium, the guard towers, the barbed wire fences, the foundations of barracks that once held people in the most unimaginable conditions,” the president said, standing at the Tower entrance to the camp, where the clock is frozen at 3:15, “the hour of liberation” on April 11, 1945. “More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished.” “I will not forget what I have seen here today,” the president said. More than 56,000 people perished at Buchenwald, including Wiesel’s father, whom the Nobel Peace Prize recipient memorialized today. Wiesel said
A day after President Barack Obama made his appeal in Cairo for peace in the Middle East, he visited two sites in Germany that epitomize war’s power to destroy as well as society’s ability to rebuild. Close to Buchenwald concentration camp, where 56,000 people, mostly Jews, died, and home of the newly restored Frauenkirche cathedral, which lay in ruins for decades after World War II, Dresden is one of the world’s most powerful symbols of postwar reconciliation and reconstruction, says London-based Alan Russell, chairman of the Dresden Fund, which raised $2 million in recent years to reconstruct the famed church. After angering many Israelis for a comparison made in his speech Thursday in Cairo of the Holocaust and Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the Buchenwald visit also stands out as part of a careful diplomatic balancing act. “His visit to Dresden makes the point that in a war, everybody suffers – even those who started it,” Mr. Russell says, adding, “Obama shows he wants to turn t
President Obama Tours Buchenwald with Elie Wiesel ABC News – 11 hours ago President Obama spoke about the lessons of the Holocaust after touring the camp with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Sources: http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/06/president-obama-tours-buchenwald-with-elie-wiesel.
