heavy things

It is a bit overdue, but I have two very important and impressionable sites that are notable in a blog about Germany. These were both sites for my program "excursions" and they delve into some of the most emotional periods in Germany's history. We visited the Stasi Prison a little over a week ago and then the former concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, this past Friday.

The Stasi Prison was in commission from 1950 to 1989 and was an intermediate prison for suspected enemies of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)--which ruled over East Berlin behind the "Iron Curtain" when the Berlin wall was built in 1961. Once the boarder was sealed, any citizens of East Berlin who were even suspected to be in any way against the Stasi could very well end up in the torturous physical and mental rooms at the prison for questioning and to await trial. Various accounts have pointed to the padded isolation rooms and some form of water-boarding to be among the most mentally and physically terrorizing events in addition to the earlier days when as many as 11 people would be stuffed into a 12'x12'x12' room.

We toured most of the facility there and listened to the stories about the changed within the GDR and how once the physical conditions were forced to adhere to slightly better standards in the late 60's and 70's, the details to mentally breaking prisoners became more intricate.

The cells on the left and the offices on the right
--prisoners could not see out from the "glass brick" windows

Basement cells housed the most sought after prisoners like
political leaders, anti-GDR writers, and influential community members

 Perhaps the most striking aspect of this site was the fear and control the government was able to instill into its citizens. And, of course, it is extremely difficult to grasp how this was happening until 1989, the year my sister was born! Our tour guide was only in his late 20s and was a former resident of East Berlin during GDR power. He remembered his parents putting strands of their hair over the doorway to their apartment so they could check to see if the Stasi had broken into their home while they were away. It was not unusual for the Stasi to break into a home and rearrange the pictures on the wall, or fill the ashtray with cigarettes just to let a family know that they are watching. Hard to believe such organizations existed, to say the least.


The next site we visited was even more difficult to bear. The Sachsenhausen concentration camp is located on the outer rim of Berlin in Oranienburg and was open from 1936 to 1945 under Nazi control. After liberation by the Allied forces, Sachsenhausen was taken over by the Soviet Union as Special Camp Nr. 7, where they detained Nazi functionaries, anti-Communists, and Russians, including Nazi collaborators, before the close of the camp in 1950. After extensive excavations starting in the 1950's, over 12,500 bodies have been recovered, and the ashes of many more were discovered surrounding the camp's four-oven crematorium and mobile oven trucks.

I have taken courses on history, human rights, political action, and even took a class called "Genocide in the 20th Century," but none of it really prepared me for the intense hallowed feeling of walking through the camp. It would be disrespectful and naive to assume that I will in any way be able to convey any kind of "coming to terms" with the overwhelming quiet that exists at the site. And what is, perhaps, most difficult is that this was not a death camp at all. It was a labor camp, and a small one at that. Located in the center of a town. There isn't a whole lot more I can say that doesn't delve into existentialism in its entirety after visiting Sachsenhausen.

Grove of trees outside the labor
 camp with scattered memorials

"Labor Frees" on the front gate

Site marker #25: Execution Trench

"And I know one thing more--that the Europe of the future cannot exist without
commemorating all those, regardless of their nationality, who were killed that
this time with complete contempt and hate, who were tortured to death,
starved, gassed, incinerated and hanged..."
~Andrzej Szczypiorski, former Sachsenhausen prisoner

I would like to end this heavy post with one of my all-time favorite quotes that grants me piece of mind, at the very least, when I need it the most:

“The first is that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience—whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.”
~ Howard Zinn, “Failure to quit: reflections of an optimistic historian,”The Optimism of Uncertainty

Thanks for reading, I have another post that I am working on and will update again soon.

Viele Liebe! [much love]