11 January 2017--Sachsenhausen concentration camp
As the bus trundled through the sleepy German village, snow fell in whispering piles, collecting on the steep peaks of the colorful houses. Gayle slept on my shoulder as we drove through an Advent calendar. On the German radio, American music played. The British band Depeche Mode came on, singing softly. "People are people so why should it be / You and I should get along so awfully?" We were headed toward Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp about an hour outside of Berlin.
The snow made navigating the narrow roads stressful, so I tried to pay attention to my window, rather than the front of the coach. The students dozed or chatted softly, playing with their phones or thinking their thoughts. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the future prisoners of the camp, who also arrived in cold and snow, but without the comfort of a warm bus, a recent lunch, or even a coat.
We disembarked, the snow slicing between scarf and hat, flicking flakes into my eyebrows and eyelashes. We followed one another until reaching the check-in station. Large paddles with a speaker at one end allowed us to get additional information at a whim, walking from place to place and hearing lengthy descriptions of what we were looking at.
Sound paddles and maps in hand, we exited the entrance station and sluiced through the piled snow, everyone following the person in front without really knowing where we were going. The atmosphere was somber, made more so by the constant flakes and ghostly sky. We entered the outer perimeter wall and stepped into the closest building. This was more to escape the weather than because we knew what was inside.
Upon entering, a Soviet-made commemoration to the Russian prisoners of war greeted us, stained-glass windows in the stark lines that mark USSR art and propaganda. We wandered through, looking at the current exhibit, which had photographs of victims of the camp, their lined and haunted faces staring out at us with the grainy gaze of World War II photography. Each face was on a translucent sheet of cloth, making it possible to see through them, or see them from either direction. They were photographs of the ghosts of the camp.
We visited the other section of this stop in the museum, which had at one time been the garage/receiving area for the camp. There were documents of the way in which the Soviets took the camp, used it for their own purposes, and even made it, during the time in which they controlled Eastern Berlin, a new story of suffering--how the antifascists of the camp tried to rise up in rebellion (which didn't happen)--as if the true story wasn't somehow good enough.
Stepping out into the storm, we approached the main entrance. It was quiet, only the Rice Krispie sound of snow landing on trees high above and the pop-crunch of our footsteps keeping us company. I loaded information about the watch gate, taking some pictures as we approached. I made it a point to take a picture of the lie in the gate, about how work would give the men liberty.
I learned of the suddenness of brutality, how the watchmen and supervisors who sat in the gatehouse would sometimes, for no reason at all, fly out of their offices and commence beating--perhaps to death--a prisoner that they misliked. The impetus was never understood by any, but condoned by all with the right uniform.
We crossed the parade grounds, a semi-circular area where, in temperatures the same as what we were experiencing--and much worse--men would stand at attention for roll call. The procedure would take hours, making it a practice of endurance for the men who had no stamina, no health, no warmth. Men would drop into the snow and die there, unable to endure any more.
We walked over those spots.
Long, meticulously designed blocks sprawled in front of us, the buildings themselves effaced but their foundations visible despite the white mantle that spread over it. We passed the gallows where public hangings would happen for those who had somehow warranted that death--which, in the face of all they suffered, may have been a preferable way to leave. The detached, calm voice of the sound paddle explained that, at Christmas time, one of the gallows posts would be replaced with a Christmas tree. While this camp was not reserved strictly for Jews, there was an entire contingent kept there and I couldn't help but wonder if there wasn't a special meaning of Christmas for those who survived.
The bloodshed covered by time and paper-white snow, we proceeded to what had been a kitchen. We looked at the displays which documented the cruelty, the pieces of furniture that had once filled the bunk houses now strapped to display cases with explanations in both German and English. Prison garb--many of them with the pink triangle denoting the wearer to be "guilty" of the crime of homosexuality--lay a few feet from the uniforms of their oppressors.
We descended to the cellar, where cartoon drawings of happy vegetables decorated the wall, an obscene type of graffiti considering what transpired in the room--the work of food preparation had been turned into its own torture, where the rotten remains of food were washed and peeled for service to the prisoners of the camp. Supervisors were known to grab inmates and shove them into the cold washing bins, holding them under the water until the supervisors decided the person had had enough. Then the water would be used to finish preparing the food.
On the pillars of the room, vegetables smiled.
We left the kitchens and crossed down toward the medical center, which was close to the entrance. We were running low on time, and the cold had wormed its way past our layers, the flecks of flakes melting and running past our scarves, biting as it went.
The building that had housed the crematorium was gone, but the smokestacks remained--the only escape route for countless thousands who passed through the gates. The ironically-named medical bunkers were connected by a tunnel underground, one through which we walked, knowing that there had been a time in living memory when the walls of that hallway were overcrowded with corpses, lined up and awaiting disposal.
In the infirmary basement, we saw a room that had once been the dissection room, but had been later converted into another kitchen. The original fixtures, where possible, had been preserved, with the ground itself protected beneath glass that lined the walkway. Every step echoed with a morose, ominous sound, as though the ghosts of the camp were repeating our steps, reminding us of our choices.
We trudged through the snow, the camp closing for the day--an action that is normal for a mausoleum-turned-museum, and listened to the final explanations of the experiments that had been performed at the camp. They had wanted to study gangrene, so they inserted glass and sawdust into victims' bodies in order to replicate the disease.
One doctor had wanted to test a hypothesis about hepatitis C. The only way to get his experiment to work was to have children--aged 8 to 15--and inject them with a vial full of the vile test. The children rapidly deteriorated after the gelatinous mixture had been inserted into them. The doctors had taken the children--brought from another camp but all of Jewish ancestry--and extracted a biopsy from the liver...an agonizing procedure the caused the children to weep. From what I could gather, they were never cured of the Nazi doctor's enhanced form of the virus.
We returned to the bus, driving through the darkness and back toward Berlin. Gayle and I sat in silence for much of the time, resting and thinking. That night, I could tell that the experience hadn't gone well for her--which is perhaps the best thing that could come from a visit to a concentration camp. She later told me it was the description of the children's abuse that hurt her the most--and I don't blame her.
I sit on a high speed train out to Cologne as I type this. The students are napping, laughing, giggling at YouTube videos or funny observations. All is normal in the world, which is as it should be. The happiness that the students (I hope) feel throughout the trip is not wrong...
...but the sadness of the camp, the tears it invokes, the suffering it contains--in short, that which was wrong--is what I'm thinking of. The disparity is almost too much to handle. Quaint German towns, their ancient rooftops coated with solar panels and industrialized marketing symbols representing the dichotomy of European history and modernity, stream past the windows. Graffiti tag wall after wall, and church spires drift above the treeline. The naked trees above the green yards give a sense of loss and possibility. There is much beauty here, but awash in the memories of a sliver of a fraction of the cost of the Holocaust, I can't help but mourn a little. Indeed, I feel a heavier weight with my experience on reflection than on participation. Part of that stems from the fact that there were few "surprises" of the camp--I knew much of what happened at these places already--but I think there was a part of me that was too worried about the tour, the cold, the snow, the students to allow me to pull in the gravity of the grave site.
This will mean more to me as time goes on, and I'm grateful that I had the chance to go. Sadly, there are some things everyone needs to experience personally. Now was my time.
As the bus trundled through the sleepy German village, snow fell in whispering piles, collecting on the steep peaks of the colorful houses. Gayle slept on my shoulder as we drove through an Advent calendar. On the German radio, American music played. The British band Depeche Mode came on, singing softly. "People are people so why should it be / You and I should get along so awfully?" We were headed toward Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp about an hour outside of Berlin.
The snow made navigating the narrow roads stressful, so I tried to pay attention to my window, rather than the front of the coach. The students dozed or chatted softly, playing with their phones or thinking their thoughts. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the future prisoners of the camp, who also arrived in cold and snow, but without the comfort of a warm bus, a recent lunch, or even a coat.
We disembarked, the snow slicing between scarf and hat, flicking flakes into my eyebrows and eyelashes. We followed one another until reaching the check-in station. Large paddles with a speaker at one end allowed us to get additional information at a whim, walking from place to place and hearing lengthy descriptions of what we were looking at.
Sound paddles and maps in hand, we exited the entrance station and sluiced through the piled snow, everyone following the person in front without really knowing where we were going. The atmosphere was somber, made more so by the constant flakes and ghostly sky. We entered the outer perimeter wall and stepped into the closest building. This was more to escape the weather than because we knew what was inside.
Upon entering, a Soviet-made commemoration to the Russian prisoners of war greeted us, stained-glass windows in the stark lines that mark USSR art and propaganda. We wandered through, looking at the current exhibit, which had photographs of victims of the camp, their lined and haunted faces staring out at us with the grainy gaze of World War II photography. Each face was on a translucent sheet of cloth, making it possible to see through them, or see them from either direction. They were photographs of the ghosts of the camp.
We visited the other section of this stop in the museum, which had at one time been the garage/receiving area for the camp. There were documents of the way in which the Soviets took the camp, used it for their own purposes, and even made it, during the time in which they controlled Eastern Berlin, a new story of suffering--how the antifascists of the camp tried to rise up in rebellion (which didn't happen)--as if the true story wasn't somehow good enough.
Stepping out into the storm, we approached the main entrance. It was quiet, only the Rice Krispie sound of snow landing on trees high above and the pop-crunch of our footsteps keeping us company. I loaded information about the watch gate, taking some pictures as we approached. I made it a point to take a picture of the lie in the gate, about how work would give the men liberty.
I learned of the suddenness of brutality, how the watchmen and supervisors who sat in the gatehouse would sometimes, for no reason at all, fly out of their offices and commence beating--perhaps to death--a prisoner that they misliked. The impetus was never understood by any, but condoned by all with the right uniform.
We crossed the parade grounds, a semi-circular area where, in temperatures the same as what we were experiencing--and much worse--men would stand at attention for roll call. The procedure would take hours, making it a practice of endurance for the men who had no stamina, no health, no warmth. Men would drop into the snow and die there, unable to endure any more.
We walked over those spots.
Long, meticulously designed blocks sprawled in front of us, the buildings themselves effaced but their foundations visible despite the white mantle that spread over it. We passed the gallows where public hangings would happen for those who had somehow warranted that death--which, in the face of all they suffered, may have been a preferable way to leave. The detached, calm voice of the sound paddle explained that, at Christmas time, one of the gallows posts would be replaced with a Christmas tree. While this camp was not reserved strictly for Jews, there was an entire contingent kept there and I couldn't help but wonder if there wasn't a special meaning of Christmas for those who survived.
The bloodshed covered by time and paper-white snow, we proceeded to what had been a kitchen. We looked at the displays which documented the cruelty, the pieces of furniture that had once filled the bunk houses now strapped to display cases with explanations in both German and English. Prison garb--many of them with the pink triangle denoting the wearer to be "guilty" of the crime of homosexuality--lay a few feet from the uniforms of their oppressors.
We descended to the cellar, where cartoon drawings of happy vegetables decorated the wall, an obscene type of graffiti considering what transpired in the room--the work of food preparation had been turned into its own torture, where the rotten remains of food were washed and peeled for service to the prisoners of the camp. Supervisors were known to grab inmates and shove them into the cold washing bins, holding them under the water until the supervisors decided the person had had enough. Then the water would be used to finish preparing the food.
On the pillars of the room, vegetables smiled.
We left the kitchens and crossed down toward the medical center, which was close to the entrance. We were running low on time, and the cold had wormed its way past our layers, the flecks of flakes melting and running past our scarves, biting as it went.
The building that had housed the crematorium was gone, but the smokestacks remained--the only escape route for countless thousands who passed through the gates. The ironically-named medical bunkers were connected by a tunnel underground, one through which we walked, knowing that there had been a time in living memory when the walls of that hallway were overcrowded with corpses, lined up and awaiting disposal.
In the infirmary basement, we saw a room that had once been the dissection room, but had been later converted into another kitchen. The original fixtures, where possible, had been preserved, with the ground itself protected beneath glass that lined the walkway. Every step echoed with a morose, ominous sound, as though the ghosts of the camp were repeating our steps, reminding us of our choices.
We trudged through the snow, the camp closing for the day--an action that is normal for a mausoleum-turned-museum, and listened to the final explanations of the experiments that had been performed at the camp. They had wanted to study gangrene, so they inserted glass and sawdust into victims' bodies in order to replicate the disease.
One doctor had wanted to test a hypothesis about hepatitis C. The only way to get his experiment to work was to have children--aged 8 to 15--and inject them with a vial full of the vile test. The children rapidly deteriorated after the gelatinous mixture had been inserted into them. The doctors had taken the children--brought from another camp but all of Jewish ancestry--and extracted a biopsy from the liver...an agonizing procedure the caused the children to weep. From what I could gather, they were never cured of the Nazi doctor's enhanced form of the virus.
We returned to the bus, driving through the darkness and back toward Berlin. Gayle and I sat in silence for much of the time, resting and thinking. That night, I could tell that the experience hadn't gone well for her--which is perhaps the best thing that could come from a visit to a concentration camp. She later told me it was the description of the children's abuse that hurt her the most--and I don't blame her.
I sit on a high speed train out to Cologne as I type this. The students are napping, laughing, giggling at YouTube videos or funny observations. All is normal in the world, which is as it should be. The happiness that the students (I hope) feel throughout the trip is not wrong...
...but the sadness of the camp, the tears it invokes, the suffering it contains--in short, that which was wrong--is what I'm thinking of. The disparity is almost too much to handle. Quaint German towns, their ancient rooftops coated with solar panels and industrialized marketing symbols representing the dichotomy of European history and modernity, stream past the windows. Graffiti tag wall after wall, and church spires drift above the treeline. The naked trees above the green yards give a sense of loss and possibility. There is much beauty here, but awash in the memories of a sliver of a fraction of the cost of the Holocaust, I can't help but mourn a little. Indeed, I feel a heavier weight with my experience on reflection than on participation. Part of that stems from the fact that there were few "surprises" of the camp--I knew much of what happened at these places already--but I think there was a part of me that was too worried about the tour, the cold, the snow, the students to allow me to pull in the gravity of the grave site.
This will mean more to me as time goes on, and I'm grateful that I had the chance to go. Sadly, there are some things everyone needs to experience personally. Now was my time.