sachsenhausen.

ss casino.

work will make you free.




the soviets erected this political monument depicting a soldier freeing two prisoners. the prisoners are carved with strong, able bodies. this is not what they would have looked like.

perhaps more like this.



Sachsenhausen was the first time I have visited a concentration camp. It was such an intensely unbelievable thing… I have always had a deep interest in the history surrounding World War II; coming from a family with a German/Jewish background, perhaps that is only natural. I remember my first exposure to the Shoa; we began learning about it in grade school. I remember my disbelief that extermination to that scale had happened. I remember my mom sitting me down and explaining to me, in a surprisingly sophisticated and honest way, the family history surrounding that time. And from then, I read everything I could, trying to make sense of something so deeply, disturbingly unbelievable. It happened. Visiting Sachsenhausen made that real to me in a way the photos, the books, the family history could not.

The day we were there… it was a beautiful one, but the air was so still… the energy, so suffocating. No birds sang… nothing was alive. We talked as a group about our experience later that night, and I recalled seeing nothing living but two bees and a fly. I imagine that natural life cannot exist where there are such traces of death. I imagine that no matter what occupies that space, it will remain, still, haunted, and sad. I do not understand how people live around the camp today, especially since the homes around the camp were built by prisoners for SS officers. I believe the people of Oranienburg (the town in which Sachsenhausen lies), live in denial of the ghosts that must so constantly haunt them. When they lie down at night, I wonder what comes in the darkness.

And it is so disturbing that the citizens of Oranienburg (in the 30’s and 40’s) allowed the camp to become so intertwined with their way of life. From what I understand, they reaped much economic gain, as prisoners were loaned out to work for the town. The people knew what was happening behind those walls… they smelled the death… and yet, they let it happen… they let it continue.

Toby, our guide, said that after the Soviets liberated the camp, they opened it to the public, announcing that anyone who wanted to see the evidence of the atrocities inside, could come look… no one came. No one wanted the illusion to be shattered. No one wanted to take responsibility.

Today it is so important that we know… that we remember… that we take responsibility. Even though wrapping one’s head around the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million human beings is like trying to thoroughly imagine the size of our universe, we must try. It is crucial to writing our future.

The experience of the camp is only now beginning to resonate. Now that I have the physical memory reference of the camp, when I read, or see photos… when I think about my family in that situation, I am very much overcome with emotion. It is very, very hard to think about and impossible to imagine.