Concentration Camp and Wall

Guten Abend,

Well, this was our last full day in Berlin. Katie went with some others and I went to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp just a little bit outside Berlin.

I won't go into detail about everything I saw in the concentration camp or heard. If you want to see that, you will have to look at the pictures on facebook when I post them.

My tour group was fairly small, with only 14 of us plus our guide. The youngest person in the group was an 11 year old boy on his school holiday from England. They are close enough that he and his father actually flew down just for this and fly back tonight. He had been learning about the Holocaust in school and asked to come. By the end of our 3 1/2 hour tour, he was pretty tired. Most of the rest of us were between about 16 and 25. The were a few older adults also, with their teens. My guide just finished his Masters Degree in History. He has been a tour guide to pay for his schooling. He is just a few years older than me (probably no more than 5 if that), and he did an excellent job.

This is the first concentration camp that I have been too, but I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. Few original buildings are left, but many that were re-built were re-built with the original materials. The first thing to strike me as we were walking along, was that we walked from the train station and through the village, just as the prisoners did. It was a little eery to do, knowing what happened on those streets not so long ago. The thing that struck me that hardest in the tour, and made me a little nauseous, was seeing the iron gate that said "Arbeit Mach Frei." I knew that there was a good chance that it would be there, but didn't think about it until it was in front of me. After walking through that gate, we entered the area where roll was called before they were marched out to work and after they returned.

The other thing was the death chambers in Z Block. The people taken there from the camp were taken out of the camp and on a march so they didn't know where they were going, even though it was directly beside some of the barracks. The original foundations for the second set of death chambers, built in 1942, are still there. I was struck by a few things. 1) How many rooms they used to process people through their death and cremation, and 2) how small the rooms were. I think of death chambers as large rooms, but these were small, and the people who were killed were shot or gassed in rooms that are about the size of a room where a doctor might see you, a single dorm room, or the largest might be like a normal bedroom.

It was mostly a pretty, sunny day, and you have to assume that many of the summer days were like that when people were in the camps, but at the same time, we were walking through empty areas where buildings used to be, and they were walking between long, close, over-crowded buildings never knowing if they would see the next day. It is scary to think about.

In the places where there used to be buildings are some stone blocks about 7 feet long, 2.5 feet wide, and 2 feet tall. Each of these are numbered. On top of these, and in many other places throughout the camp, you will see piles of rocks and some flowers. It is interesting, because I had never seen anybody put rocks on graves or memorials before I went to Israel. Because I had that experience in Israel, when I came to Sachsenhausen, I recognized why the rocks were there. In Jewish tradition you put rocks on graves, much like Christians put flowers. Knowing that meaning and seeing huge piles of these rocks everywhere, it was a powerful reminder of how many people died. This is real.

One of the things that we were told to do was pack a lunch. I did so, but couldn't bring myself to eat it until almost 2, because it seemed disrespectful in a place where so many people starved to death, before and after the war. I did end up eating, simply because I was getting dizzy, but it did upset me a little.

After the War, the Soviet Union used Sachsenhausen for a prison camp, and many people starved, though death was not the goal. After the Soviet Union stopped using the camp, East Germany made it in to a memorial. The statues, artwork, and entrances were set up to highlight that Communism had defeated Facism, so everybody should be happy. It was pro-communism propaganda. They are not the only country to use historical sites for propaganda, by the way. My guide told us that he has a friend who was initiated into the Boy Scouts in Sachsenhausen, in front of a memorial to the communist prisoners and a statue highlighting the Soviet liberation of the camp.

It was quite an experience, though in some ways less sickening than a Holocaust museum, because you aren't looking at pictures. In some ways it is more sickening, because you walked the way that so many people actually walked to their deaths, less than 80 years ago. You walked where they were shot, hung, beaten, starved, and gassed (well, we didn't walk in the gas chamber, but all the rest of these things happened out in the camp as well as in the death chamber). I am not yet sure how to respond. I almost feel numb, and I do feel exhausted.

After the tour, I went down to the East Side Gallery and looked at the wall. Most likely, no one reading this blog has seen it as it looks now. Last year, they let artists paint new paintings on it in honor of 20 years of the wall being down. I had seen it from the bus a few days ago, but today I walked slowly along its length and saw the many paintings: some that I understood and some that I did not. Many had to do with peace, and many were powerful, and many, were confusing. I am glad that I went back before I left Berlin.

Well, I am going to head out to get dinner, so, this is the end of my last post from Berlin.

Auf Weidershen one last time.