Sachsenhausen.

On my last day in Berlin, I made the most important day trip I have ever made.  I went to the work camp Sachsenhausen.  Our guide was up front about the fact that the trip wasn’t meant to be enjoyable, that we would feel awful, and that it would be difficult.  I thought I was ready - after all, I had been to the museum in DC and had been studying the Holocaust since I was twelve.  I was wrong.

We took the train to Sachsenhausen, following the exact route prisoners took when they were incarcerated there.  Our guide explained the story of who was in the camp, which was mostly a political dissidents/ Communists camp.  He told us people in the surrounding community knew about the camp, but were told it was a few week program and prisoners would eventually return to their families.  This was largely untrue.  If the prisoners in the camp weren’t shot by guards, tortured, or put through the small extermination center, station Zed, they were starved or malnourished.  Diseases spread quickly through the camp.

I should pause here and make the distinction now: Sachsenhausen was NOT a death camp.  It was a work camp.  Prisoners there were in charge of doing a lot of manual labor for the Nazis and were only exterminated if it was “necessary” - they fell ill or were too weak to work anymore.  Sachsenhausen was also in charge of one of the largest successful counterfeiting operations in history.  The nazis used prisoners who were formerly criminally charged for counterfeiting or related crimes and asked them to counterfeit currency such as the British pound.  The German government then used these bills to buy munitions and other things from England and even America.  The guide recommended the movie The Counterfeiters for those interested in that operation.

The barracks were small, dark, and cold.  There aren’t words to describe the emotions I felt.  What it must have been like for those who lived there!  400 men to a bathroom, all having to get up and ready to stand for roll call within ten minutes.  Cold, thin cotton uniforms.  No hair.  The guards would shave a prisoner’s hair and give him a uniform and a number upon arrival.  Uniforms were never the right size.  They did all of this to dehumanize the prisoners, making it easier for guards to treat them as less than human due to their appearance.

There was a camp prison.  The place existed for the sole purpose of having somewhere worse than the mainstream camp.  People were tortured in the building, and their screams could be heard throughout the camp.  The whole place was so exposed.  There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to be alone.

Station Zed was terrifying.  Only the foundation remained, but I could still feel what it must have been like.  This is what happened.  Prisoners who were to be put to death were simply told they had to see a doctor for a checkup, which was a regular thing and no cause for alarm.  A doctor would perform a series of tests, but all they were really checking for was gold teeth.  If one had gold teeth, he was marked with a large X on his chest, so the nazis knew to pick his teeth out before cremation.  After the exams, the prisoners were divided into different groups.  One group was sent to the “showers” or the gas chamber.  The chamber at Sachsenhausen was small, as again they were only a work camp.  Once dead, they were placed in crematoriums.  The other group were sent for “additional tests” in a small room.  A doctor would measure their height, while on the other side of the wall a soldier with a gun shot each prisoner in the back of the neck.  Gold teeth were removed and they were sent to the gas chambers.

I left the camp in a mixture of dull emotions under an overwhelming sense of numbness.  It was almost as if I couldn’t feel because I had died to the world as these men had done.  The emotions flowing under the numbness varied, from anger to sadness to grief to gratefulness at being alive.  As an American Catholic woman with European ancestry I haven’t ever been discriminated against or felt threatened in the way I can imagine these people have been.  If you travel to Europe, please, go to a concentration camp.  You can read my account, you can go to the museum, but it will never hit home unless you walk in their footsteps and see what they saw.  Going to the camp itself is free, tours are not expensive, and it’s an experience that will change your life and make you think differently about your neighbors all across the world.