Berlin, Germany….It’s a rainy
grey morning in Berlin, and we’re joining two German friends and a Dutch couple to drive to Sachsenhausen, the former concentration camp (and later a Soviet special camp) located beside the town of Oranienburg north of Berlin. Tens of thousands of people, including many political prisoners, huge numbers of Russians, and even a few Brits, died there by the time World War Two was over.
I’ve never been to a concentration camp, and have understandably mixed feelings about our outing, yet I want to go. In fact, it seems like a moral obligation to make this destination a part of our trip to Berlin and Germany. My husband Russ, who visited a concentration camp many years ago, also feels this imperative to return, and to contemplate the horrors from a more mature and sober perspective than his 20-something self may have done in the 70’s.
O
ne of our German friends escorting us today is a retired teacher who started taking his classes to Sachsenhausen years ago, and sees the trip as an essential history lesson for all Germans. He will be our guide.
It turns out he’s an excellent commentator, making sure we see what is most important to see: the dismal barracks where prisoners were housed; the brutally sub-standard toilet facilities where people crushed together and guards sometimes drowned men by pushing their heads under water; the watch tower where displays examine the question of how much the townspeople knew and why they didn’t try to help the prisoners; the brutal detention centre within the prison; the stark pathology building; and finally, the gas chamber, ovens, and execution site in an unspeakably awful building known as “Station Z” (the last stop).
There are also effective displays documenting the lives of many of the people who died here, showing them as young vigorous family people engaged in normal lives. Sachsenhausen was a “model” camp, not designed for the mass exterminations elsewhere, but as a place where the SS could learn and perfect the various methods of confinement, torture and killing. Hence, many “special” prisoners were sent here, including Hitler’s political enemies.
All day, the rain keeps coming down and we walk through puddles and mud. After seeing images of these camps for so many years, it is hard to believe I’m standing on the soggy ground where so many unimaginable horrors took place.
What lingers with me is 
the question: what would I have done if I had lived nearby? The townspeople who saw prisoners — including old men and children — getting off the trains, were told that these pathetic people were criminals who were responsible for the war.
Would I have risked my family’s safety by speaking out, or trying to help prisoners escape? Or would I have remained on the sidelines, averting my eyes and convincing myself that those nice SS men who played on our town sports teams and added music to our festivals were really just engaged in training activities behind the walls of a well-run prison?
We want to believe that we know what we would do. It negates our humanity to imagine that we could have accepted the reality of this camp in our midst. Yet, with a humbling icy horror, I recognize that I cannot answer these questions with certainty, and that is the reason we must keep these memories alive.
It’s about remembrance. It’s about human weakness and cowardice versus vigilance and courage. It’s about trying to fathom how “civilized” people could have allowed or taken part in unfathomable evil. It’s about exploring the depths of the human soul. But most of all here at Sachsenhausen, it’s about honouring those who died on this very spot.
Photo Credits
All photos © Star Weiss
“Arbeit Macht Frei, was the slogan at every concentration camp and translates as “Work Liberates” or “Work makes us free”.
“The ovens in Station Z”
“Shows the wire and barriers at the walls”
“Inside Station Z”
“Inside a typical barracks”
I just got around to reading this know and it gives me a sick kind of feeling in my stomach. I hope to visit a concentration camp someday too and I’m glad you wrote this post to keep the memory of what happened alive.
As a Jew whose parents were on both sides of the war (father an RAF pilot, mother was German) this was a very striking essay. I was very touched by the questions raised about the townspeople knew. I often asked my mother (deceased) about what she knew. She could never bring herself to talk about the war or her life in Germany during the war. When she passed on, I could only turn to other family members to try and get answers. Most of the time I was met by silence, but only through a long lost relative have I been able to get some answers. This piece by Ms. Weiss has rekindled my desire to find out more
The act of bearing witness is such an important one, and you have done so admirably here, Star. It makes me ask myself `How can I bear witness?` when I`m so separated from these events by time and distance.
I`d be interested to know how Russ reacted now — as a husband, father and grandfather — compared to the twenty-something who first visited a concentration camp.
Thanks for this, Star.
I’ve been so moved by the various responses to my piece on the concentration camp, and thank you for those. Especially your tale of gong through a camp with a survivor, Laurie, which is incredible. And your musings about what you would do, Michael. I just watched The Boy in the Striped Pajamas last night, and recommend it to you if you haven’t seen it…and I’m now reading Conscience and Courage, a book about those brave people who did hide and rescue Jews during the war.
I’ll continue to explore this topic, and very much appreciate your feedback. Thank you.
“What would I have done if I had lived nearby? ” In the end this is really the only question for me, the one that kept me up nights as a boy, informed my politics as a young man of draft age during Vietnam and still causes me unrest when i look at how we, the US, is in the world. “What would i have done” leads directly to ‘what will i do”. Great piece Star, there is fundamental truth to the phrase “lest we forget” Thank you for your writing and your courage.
This brought me back 25 years, when I was 20 and visited a concentration camp in Austria. I had read about it in one of the books my mom gave me to read about the holocaust. The camp was tucked away in a small village in the mountains. Unbeknown to me, there were no hotels nearby so a teenager offered me a place at her parents. I could see they were very embarrassed talking about the concentration camp. I wondered how they had responded to what was happening in their community during the war. I ended up walking through that camp with an elderly man who was seeing the place for the first time since he’d been liberated from it. His description of life at that camp will never leave me. Later I relayed the story to my traveling companion from Texas. He scoffed and said the guy was just looking for sympathy, that he probably tattooed his own arm. I remember thinking it was a shame that my Texan friend hadn’t been the one to walk through that camp with the survivor.
Very powerful, Star. You are so right. Does any of us really know how we would react? I like to think I would do the right thing. Unfortunately, fear of torture, torture itself and the threat of death to oneself or our families can break the strongest among us.
What a great pity it is for all of humanity that that the evils of the concentration camps was not the end of this kind of treatment of humans by other humans. Thank you for writing this story.
This must have been a very difficult visit Starr, especially for someone who has written so extensively of the sacred places of our earth. To visit such a place of horror and it’s remnants of disturbed energy I can only imagine must have left you with profound sadness.