Imagine a large building straddling a small gravel path. A heavy gate, propped open, sits between the two halves of the building. This is where political prisoners--Jews, Slavs, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and so many more--walked through, already sick and weak and hungry, suffering simply because people didn't like them. On the walls are two plaques, commemorating the American troops that liberated the camp and the many "undesirables" that lived and died there. You step into a huge, empty, grey expanse. First, imagine a giant field of gravel. Your attention is immediately caught by an open space bigger than a football field, a huge courtyard. This is where political prisoners would have roll call twice a day, when they had to stand at perfect attention for over an hour while they were counted by number and required to salute the commander of the camp. There are long, low buildings to the left and a large building to the right with a main part and two wings on either side parallel to each other. Far at the end of the field of grey you see one, two lines of barbed wire fences and watchtowers appearing at intervals. Everything is big and flat and grey and quiet, the overcast sky pressing down on the angular gravel and cement of the camp.
You walk across the field of gravel, step by slow step, until you reach the low buildings that housed the prisoners. You walk through the drafty wooden rooms and look at the bunks; wooden structures three beds high. When the camp was first built in 1933 prisoners had their own bunks, built next to each other in pairs. In 1938 they had bunks that stretched across the room, ten people next to each other, with short boards seperating them. By the end of the war, when the camp which had been built for 6,000 prisoners held 32,000 instead, they just had long bunks that stretched across without boards to seperate them, for prisoners to sleep packed together tightly. You walk out of the building and behind it are rows and rows of perimeters for other buildings like it, buildings that are exactly the same, line after line of them. You thought that one building held a lot of people, and yet there is room for over 30 more buildings behind it.
You walk past the rows and at the end are three memorials: one to the Protestants that died at the camp, one to the Catholics, and one to the Jews. You continue past them to the left, past one fence, a ditch, another fence, and now you see a memorial to Russian Orthodox prisoners. You walk on and see a low brick building with two chimmneys and a smokestack. The crematorium.
How can I even begin to describe the importance of this? The crematorium is a symbol of all the death and destruction of the Holocaust. There is no place where the horror is as obvious as there. Everything you see leads your imagination to run wild and causes your heart to grow heavier and heavier until the weight seems to draw tears from your eyes. You walk through the doors into an empty room. This is where corpses of the deceased were piled before they were cremated. You walk into the next room, and you're faced by the stoves, long and made of brick, the doors propped open. You look up at the ceiling and see chimmneys. You walk through the next door into another empty room and finally into a gas chamber. Fake shower heads hang from the ceiling. A few vents and doors are on the walls. Aside from the modern addition of a small light everything is dark. You walk into the next room and see above the door to the gas chamber: brausebad. Showers. This is the room where victims were stripped of their clothes. The next empty room is where they were told that they were being given a "shower." There is one last room, a room where victims' clothes were cleaned, and then you step out into the light, but the weight doesn't leave you.
Just being on the grounds is shocking, sobering, but there are also the stories. Stories of having to stand stilll for hours in all kinds of weather, of punishments like being tied to a stake, of the infamous death march forcing thousands to walk to their deaths just three days befor the camp's liberation. I don't quite know why I decided to share this on my blog. Really, I guess I felt like of all the things we've seen and done so far, and of all the things we will have seen and done by the end of this trip, this is the most important to know. On the grounds there was a memorial, and it said in many diferent languages, over and over: never again. Never again can this happen, because every year we are ever more capable of doing the same thing in even more terrible ways. And it is our duty to those who died, and those who survived, to remember, so that their hardships are always honored and never repeated. So I guess I felt like it would be wrong to not tell you all about this and yet describe in detail the petty lives of 19th century monarchs. Even though the Holocaust happened 70 years ago it is still something that everyone should know, however difficult it may be.
I know I don't have any photos on this post, and I'm sorry about that. Like I said at the beginning, it felt wrong to take pictures. But if you are still curious, look on the internet. Do more research, look at more pictures. There are some things that I didn't bother trying to describe because I couldn't make myself, it was too hard. But even though I couldn't describe that to you, please don't stop yourself. It's something everyone should know.
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