This week was a bit of down time. I wasn’t feeling well, weeks of arduous (for me, anyway) physical activity, the need to catch up on my studies, and a sick roommate slowed my progress down considerably. To top that off, my first visit to a concentration camp took the wind out of my emotional sails to a surprising degree. Of course, I started the week celebrating International Worker’s Day, which was possibly the drunkest I have been in 15 years, but was an amazing night.
J’accuse, Ben Kohn. Now pardon me whilst I spend the rest of the day dying in a dusty corner like an old moth. I vaguely remember staggering around Kreuzberg drunk as hell being obnoxious Americans… I think we danced… I might have hit on a German cop (or I dreamed it, not sure)… there was a French guy…. I took the U-Bahn home by myself because everyone wanted to keep drinking and I just couldn’t. I was so drunk I couldn’t sit upright waiting for the train… there was a harmonica player on the train… I managed to get home just fine and without incident, and nobody harassed me. Achievement unlocked.
I don’t really have anything I could possibly say to make the gravity and horror of a concentration camp make sense to anyone who hasn’t been to one. It doesn’t even make sense once you’ve been to one. This place is an unholy despair factory designed by sadistic brilliance. And right now I am sitting at a mass grave, in pleasant neighborhood listening to the autobahn and the blackbirds whir and chirp in the background. They built the modern police training barracks next to the camp. As a warning. This is what happens when authority goes unchecked and brutality takes the place of protection. This is a terrible place filled with the memories of terrible acts that illustrate how far that can go in the blink of an eye.
Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, Oranienburg. Photo by Scarlett Messenger
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Today’s trip to the concentration camp has left me feeling pretty fragile inside. It was so much worse than I imagined it would be. It isn’t the same as reading about it. It’s so much more visceral standing where tens of thousands experienced cruelty and pain none of us will ever know. I genuinely loathe the idea of people suffering such unimaginable atrocities, to the point where I can’t shake it. I always assumed this was normal, but after watching people runaround the camp with their selfie sticks and then talk about where to go for lunch on the bus afterward, I don’t know anymore. I felt sick and horrible the whole time, like there was a stench in the air but you couldn’t smell it. I had to force myself to take pictures because I knew I would regret not documenting it. I sat for a really long time at the mass grave and didn’t even realize there were tears in my eyes. Is it stupid to get that emotionally worked up about anonymous people who died 70 years ago? I don’t think so. Someone has to mourn them, and anyone who remembers them is most likely dead by now.
Toilets, Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, Oranienburg. Photo by Scarlett Messenger
*** This place had a sign out front that said, “the most beautiful concentration camp in Germany” and I was really perplexed that that would be a bragging point. And if this is what a beautiful concentration camp looks like, I’m not sure I want to see the “shithole” version. And I think that was the worst part, getting into the heads if the people who were there. How could you survive that? When the war was over, what the hell did the guards do? NONE of the guards at Sachsenhausen were convicted after the war, they just went on with their lives. I mean, these people were someone’s parents, grandparents. “Gee daddy, what did you do in the war?” “Well, son, I drowned homosexuals in toilets and tricked over 10,000 Soviet POWs into getting shot in the neck. We had a great time!” Seriously, how can you live with yourself? I hurt someone’s feelings and it haunts me for years, can there really be that many psychopaths out there?
In researching a song for my hiking and drinking song class, I found one called “Ein Vogel wollte Hochzeit machen” (A bird wants to have a wedding). I tried to learn more about it on Wikipedia, but according to what I could translate, the page mostly seems to be arguing about how birds can’t actually get married and a blackbird and thrush can’t mate because of biological incompatibilities. Or something….
To sincerely paraphrase Stevie Nicks: O, Deutschland. You are the poet in my heart. Never change, never stop.
An Study of the German Forest in Song, Myth, and Folklore
