Sachsenhausen
We arrived by train, Graham and I, just as the prisoners would have. Sachsenhausen. It's just another town on the outskirts of Berlin, with normal people, in their normal houses, doing their normal things. But after just a short walk through the town, past the houses where the SS guards used to live, we arrive at the gate.
Arbeit macht frei. Work will make you free. We walk through into the centre of the camp. As I stand there, I try to visualise the tens of thousands of prisoners, standing at attention - tired, beaten, malnourished and scared. I try to visualise the guards as they call out the roll, and as they taunt and abuse the prisoners.
But I can't. It's all too hard. I know that in the very place I'm standing over 200,000 people once stood; most of whom eventually died in this camp, or at another. But I just can't imagine it. I mean, I'm standing here during the mildest winter on record, wearing a gazillion layers, and my butt is freezing!
After touring the camp - the barracks where the prisoners were crammed into, the cells for solitary confinement, the polls used for torture, the nooses, the electric fence running around the whole camp, the hospital where they carried out "medical experiments", and the cellar where they kept the bodies (you can still see the blood stains) - we headed out to station Z.
As the name suggests, this was the execution centre. Now Sachsenhausen was not a death camp like Auschwitz. People didn't come there to die, they came there to work. All the same, they did execute a mere 30,000 people at the camp. The picture below is of the trench which they would fill with prisoners, and then shoot into. Then other prisoners would have to clear out the trench, before going in themselves.
Eventually they would change this method - it was all too emotional, both for the soldiers and the inmates. Instead they built a building, invited prisoners in for a "medical check-up", and had them shot from behind while they were getting their height measured. It was easier that way.
Leaving the camp, I felt... disappointed. Disappointed because I thought that if I just stood in the camp, and saw and heard things for myself, I'd be able to grasp them; I'd be able to understand. But the holocaust is something that I don't think I'll ever be able to comprehend.
Since then, I've been reflecting on the whole experience. If you asked me what the most painful part of the whole thing was, it would be this fact - that after the soviets liberated the camp, after they saw for themselves the atrocities that had been committed - they did what any logical person would do: they reopened Sachsenhausen as a soviet concentration camp! From 1945 to 1950, another 6,000 people died in the camp.
People always say that we should learn from history. And yet I look at the world today and wonder if we really have: Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia, Iraq, Rwanda, Sudan. And we so often forget that even Australia (and America) were founded on Genocide.
How can we ever say that humans are intrinsically good? How can I ever say that I'm a good person? The power to commit atrocities, or to sit idly by, lies dormant inside us all. History proves it. If our situations were swapped, and I was in Germany, would I have done any different?