Alright, I found some time to get some writing in. Again, sorry about missing the post for yesterday, but it turned out to be necessary. I was planning on waking up early today to write it, but I blinked after turning off my alarm and when I opened them again, I had lost 45 minutes.
Anyway, yesterday was pretty cool. We didn’t go to the Jewish museum yesterday like I originally said. No. We went to the exact opposite: a concentration camp. We woke up early and got on the bus after a quick breakfast to ride to Sachsenhausen (Zack-zen-house-en). Our tour guide Sion (pronounced Sean) rode with us, and as soon as we arrived he started to tell us the history of the facilities. We walked down the same route that prisoners would take when they first entered the camp, and right away I could feel a cloud of heaviness settle on everyone as we walked along one of the edges of the camp. Sachsenhausen was a unique camp because it’s where a lot of practices were first tested out on the prisoners, a sort of guinea pig facility. It was also where the SS (Hitler’s personal bodyguards) was housed and trained to guard the various different camps, as well as the place where doctors were trained to test on the prisoners in the camps. The last thing was the fact that this camp was shaped in a triangle so that one person at the base could control all the rest of the camp if it was set up in radiating circles. This is one thing that wasn’t repeated because this shape made it hard to expand the camp when its full capacity was reached.
Just before getting into the camp, there was a building that the people inside called the “Green Monster” where guests to the camp would be held. The thing about these camps is that no one really saw the horror as it was going on, they would actually be told by the people inside that it was the best prison they had ever been in. The thing was, the only people the guests could talk to were the inmates, the “Aryans” that had a chance to get out of the camp and cooperated (read: lied like no other about the conditions) so that their sentence would be reduced. Finally, we were standing in the court yard just before the gates. People would stand here for as long as they were told to while the director welcomed the new batch of people and found out if they had any special skills that could be useful inside the camp. The tower separating the outside courtyard from the actual camp had a clock that was stopped at about 11:10, which was when the Soviet army stormed the camp and liberated the people within. We know this because the army had a habit of stopping the clocks when they invaded, and the time hasn’t been changed since. Unfortunately, the Soviets also recognized that the camp would be a major memorial spot and wanted to show an accurate representation of what the camp would have looked like, without regard to authenticity. This means that almost everything in the camp was most likely a restoration based on the accounts of the prisoners and the invading Soviet army.
As we walked through the gates of the tower (called Tower A), we passed a sign saying “Arbeit macht frei” or “work will make you free.” I don’t think I need to say how cruelly ironic this saying is. When we walked through, the first thing we saw were two flowerpots that would have contained beautiful arrangements so that the guests would have a good first impression. Of course this was marred by the top window of the tower that would have contained a machine gun trained on the prisoners at all time, but that’s not what the guests focused on. In this inner courtyard, the people would have to line up for roll call every morning and night. If one person was unaccounted for, everyone would have to stay until the guards found out what happened to that one person. As a consequence, there are gruesome stories of people dying in the middle of the night from the conditions and being dragged out to the courtyard for roll call by their comrades so they wouldn’t have to stay standing outside for hours. And this wasn’t just standing around, oh no. this time was a time when the guards would humiliate and torture the people, making them stand for hours without rest and beating them if they collapsed until they stood up again. They would stand in the freezing weather for as long as they were told without food or water (what little they were given) and there are instances where they would line up for evening roll call, and forced to stand through the night until morning roll call, where they would start their day all over again with no rest. These people were given as little as 300 calories a day, then forced to work 12 or more hour days to come back to these horrendous conditions.
Around the entire camp, there was the wall, preceded by an area that wild dogs were allowed to roam in freely to catch anyone trying to escape. This area was closed off by a wall of barbed wire and electric fence, with a final barrier made of sand extending a meter inward called the neutral zone. If anyone stepped on the sand barrier, they were thought to be trying to escape and were mercilessly shot and killed by the gunman in the tower. At this point, we walked down the side of the wall to where some of the last buildings were built to house the Jews. An interesting fact is that the Nazi’s didn’t send Jews to concentration and death camps from the very beginning, but started with sending criminals, mentally or physically handicapped people, homosexuals, and political prisoners in first long before Jews were sent to this particular camp. It was only in the later years that the Jews were sent to Sachsenhausen. Inside these barracks, as many as 400 people would be fit into one house, which held not only places to sleep, but lavatories and places to eat as well. In the building, we could see triple bunk beds squished side to side along the entire half the length of the building, and I can tell you right now it wouldn’t hold 400 people trying to sleep. Apparently, the rooms were so packed with people that everyone had to turn over at the exact same time to move in the middle of the night.
By the edge of the camp, there would have been an area that was so secret, not even the director was supposed to know what was going on. Inside this area lived the artists, who were working on a special project that could have changed the outcome of the war. They were painting fake British 5 pound notes. The idea was that because Great Britain was the only one in the war at that point in time, Germany would flood the world with fake money, causing the value to fall and forcing Britain to withdraw from the war effort to try and rebuild their economy. The scary thing is this could have worked if not for the internal resistance in this area. See, there was one guy who would sabotage every single perfect note he could, either through the design or the paint or whatever he could come up with so that these fake notes wouldn’t be sent out in the economy.
In another part of the camp was the prison, which may sound a bit strange, but it was crucial to the process of breaking the people who opposed the third Reich. These prisoners would be subjected to psychological torture through light and sensory deprivation, any kind of torture that could be thought up, and one method that involved tying a person’s arms behind their back, lifting them up to a hook on a tall pole, then dropping them…and letting them hang by their dislocated shoulders. This would be the area where important prisoners of war like Stalin’s son would have been held. After all, where is more safe than a prison inside a concentration camp? We then went to the kitchen that was converted into a museum for what happened at Sachsenhausen. It was terrible to see the progression of violence that happened in the camp. In the basement was where the actual kitchen was held, and it was surprising to see what was on the walls. It wasn’t desperate writings or gruesome drawings, but cheery cartoons of various fruits and vegetables doing any number of activities. It should be noted that these were probably made after the Soviets took control and used this camp for their own prisoners.
We walked around for a little bit to where Station Z was located. This was the officer’s version of a joke because you would arrive through Tower A and leave through Station Z. This was the area where most of the people were murdered, either through firing squad or gas chambers. Actually, Sachsenhausen was never supposed to be a death camp and wasn’t designed to kill so many people, so Station Z was built later. Apparently, it saw the most use when 10,000 Soviet troops were captured and held inside. They would go through a standard physical examination with a doctor, which would serve to make them relaxed. Then, when they went into a room and were measured for their height, they would lean against a measuring stick that had a sliding top. What they didn’t know was that the slit in the middle wasn’t just for the block, but for the person in the adjoining room to place a gun and kill them when they least expected it. The bodies were then thrown into the next room to await tooth removal if they had gold teeth, or cremation if they didn’t.
We walked down the last wall of the facility to the medical area, which was basically only there to make sure that the tests went well. The doctors experimented with how long it would take for a disease to spread, how long a person could be in cold water and still turn out alive, even with Gangrene and how much of an arm or leg needed to be cut off to get rid of the diseased tissue without getting rid of too much healthy tissue. As we finished the tour and walked back to the bus, I couldn’t help but look back on the hours we had spent in the camp learning about many of the things that happened there with a feeling of utter horror. How could someone get to the point that doing these horrific acts be considered OK? What strength the people inside must have had to go on living in such terrible conditions. It’s no wonder that when my brother and Grandparents had to leave the concentration camp they visited when they were in Germany. And the most chilling thing was realizing that this was all done by humans to other humans. The guards were ordinary people who were told to do something, and then did what they were told without question. Frankly, the human capacity to harm scares me, especially after seeing and hearing how the emaciated prisoners had to live for years without much hope of getting out alive.
When the tour was done, we rode back to Berlin and had a great lunch at a Lebanese place. After lunch, we had some time to ourselves until 7 when we had to go back to the hotel to practice our presentation for Otto Bock. I went with three other friends to the Gardens of the World. It took a while to get there, but it was absolutely worth it to see the beauty that was before us. It helped that that day was absolutely beautiful without a cloud in sight and the sun made the surrounding air warm. We enjoyed the smell of spring and walked through the gardens along whatever path suited our fancy at the time. When we saw the cherry tree, the four of us immediately headed over to take pictures of the blossoms that were just starting to fall in a light pink dusting of petals. We walked for a while, stopping at a park to relive our childhood for just a little bit at the awesome playground before flopping on the warm grass and just enjoying the sunshine.
We could have lain there all day, but because we only had about 45 minutes until we had to leave so we could get back to the hotel on time, we reluctantly got up and continued our journey. When we got to the Chinese gardens we admired the waterfall and koi pond, but the thing that drew our attention was the tea house. Of course we had to stop for tea; it was a tea house in the middle of an idyllic Chinese-styled garden! The tea we got came in a small compact ball that expanded as the water was allowed to seep into it. It was fascinating to watch the ball expand into a flower over the course of a few minutes. When we left, we only had a few minutes to see whatever else we wanted to see, which meant that we had to skip the labyrinth that was laid out only a little bit down the road. It’s a shame too; it looked like a super fun maze to run around in. By the time that we actually left the gardens, we had an hour to get back to the hotel. We missed the first tram back to the city, so we didn’t actually get on until about 6:15 due to the walk to get to the stop in the first place.
We waited on the bus, and watched, and waited. When we finally saw Alex, we only had about 10 minutes until we were supposed to be presenting. We called our teammates to tell them we would be a little late, and waited for the bus to bring us close enough to transfer trams. By the time we actually got to the hotel, we were 10 minutes late, but it didn’t really mean much because we didn’t start presenting until about 8. We went through the presentation process again, but with 3 groups, so it took forever. We finally finished at about 9:45, and due to the fact that no one had eaten dinner because we were supposed to have started at 7, we were hungry and didn’t want to go through the presentations again.
Wasser let us go, and I saw the Sony tower, which was really cool in the way that it lit up in different colors every few minutes. After that, we went to the Tapas-bar and ate, which was a smart decision since by this point it was about 11 and no one had eaten for the past 9 or more hours. We had a great night drinking Sangria and eating various Tapas (appetizers). By the time we left, it was about 12:30 and we had missed the last tram that would let us off right in front of the hotel. Instead of waiting for it, we thought we’d follow the tracks and save some time. The five of us had fun on our walk, but we were happy to be back at the hotel. Granted, it was about 12:45 by that point, but we were happy nonetheless. This is why I didn’t write this post yesterday; there was a lot of info and it was way too late for an early start the next day. Today was also good, but I’ll let you read that in the next post because this one is already super long as it is.
Bye!
ErinZ
PS: the reason why there's no pictures is becasue the hotel we're currently staying at won't let me upload them. As a consequence, you'll see them...tomorrow when I can get back to my host home and have time. hope you enjoyed!
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