Sachsenhausen

On our third day in Berlin, Katie and I took the S-bahn to Oranienburg, a quaint suburb that was home to one of the Nazi-built concentration camps, later used by the Communist Soviets as a work camp for the Nazis they had captured. Unlike the more famous camps, such as Aushwitz, Sachsenhausen was not an extermination camp, but a concentration camp. Though massacres and human experiments did take place in Sachsenhausen, it was not the camp’s primary purpose.

The inmates of Sachsenhausen were worked, starved and made to live a hellish nightmare. There’s probably no one reading this hasn’t been informed of what life was like in a Nazi concentration camp, so instead of explanations I will give my impressions.

As we walked along the path leading to the main entrance gates, we were bordered by fences on either side, one cement and the other chain link. Beautiful bright orange and gold leaves hung over the tops of the fences and made the walk in rather beautiful. The air was crisp and birds chirped all around us. It was a perfect serene fall day, a gift that I suppose not even jailers can deprive their prisoners of.

After passing through the main gates inscribed with the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei (work will set you free), and crossing past the no-man’s land, where anyone escaping would have to pass and anyone caught there would be immediately shot, I found myself standing in front of a half circle field. This was the roll call field, where roll call would be conducted twice a day. Often inmates would be required to stand on it for hours on end or do endless pointless movements as punishment. The ground was barren. So many feet have trampled this former patch of grass that it has never grown back and remains dirt to this day. It was also as hard as walking on cement. The usual give of a dirt field was long gone, the dirt having been packed down as countless feet trod upon it. In this case, the evil effects of what took place in the camp have even inhibited the earth’s ability to renew itself.

Directly in front of me, about 100 feet away, stood the former location of the gallows, where prisoners would be hung for various reasons. The gallows were set up in two deep rounded holes, conveniently the same size as an evergreen tree trunk. Every Christmas the jailers would set up a Christmas tree in one of the two holes, celebrating the birth of a life on the exact same spot that so many were taken away. Was this meant as a mockery to the inmates? Was it to further humiliate the many Jewish prisoners? Or was the Christmas tree simply placed there out of convenience, the jailers unaware of their own hyposcrisy? It served to remind me that the jailers were just as human as the inmates, celebrating their nation’s holidays as any other German would. Realizing they were human and not monsters, just as we all are, made it ever the more disturbing.

We like to think we are far removed from the atrocities of the Nazis and that such inhumane hatred could never again manifest itself the way it did in the past century. But those responsible for these acts were human, as we are also human. Only a few years ago one of the remaining barracks, number 32, which housed primarily Jewish inmates, was firebombed. We need to remember we are only one great hate away from the irrational manifestation of such fear and anger. The proper response to such a danger is not fear, which makes us irrational and all the more susceptible to manipulation, but integrity, involvement in the democratic process and keeping our leaders accountable. It was Plato who said “the price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” If members of a democracy refuse to allow such things to occur, they simply will not. No man can stand up against the citizens of an entire country, and this citizen will never allow a Christmas tree to be placed at the same location as the gallows.